I've just been listening to one of the best - though today relatively unknown - songs of political protest from the sixties, Phil Ochs' Ballad of William Worthy. It's a bullet aimed specifically at the ban on American citizens entering Cuba after the revolution, and sings of the defamation of a man named William Worthy, a reporter who'd travelled to Cuba. The refrain is particularly striking: Somehow it is strange to hear the State Department say / 'You are living in the free world, in the free world you must stay.' It's a potent dig at the idea that the world that named itself 'free' could maintain a forced separation from its Other, and remain 'free'. The idea that free-market capitalism could define a world as 'free', when the constraints on freedom produced by a war against 'godless communism' had generated a world that was in many ways similar to, and as unfree as, the enemy socialist bloc. It gestures towards memories of McCarthyism. And simultaneously, it points a finger to the 'free world's' enthusiastic support for murderous, dictatorial regimes of the Right, in every conceivable way and more as repugnant as anything produced by dictatorships of the Left. These are the wonderful lines that pin this lie down: Oh, why did he waste his time to see a dictator's reign / When he could have seen democracy by travellin' on to Spain? (Spain at this time, of course, was still ruled by Franco). The third flank of Ochs' attack on the 'free world' is a reference to the invasiveness of the West's relationship to the rest of the world: The only way to Cuba is with the C.I.A. Towards the end of the song, again, these lines: Oh there is really no need to travel to these evil lands /Yes, and though the list grows larger, you must try to understand / Try not to worry, if some day you should hear /'The whole world is off limits, visit Disneyland this year.' Here the forcibly maintained insulation of the American-led Western order from the rest of the world, and the maintenance of imperialist controls through the waging of constant war on the Third World, are tied concisely and forcefully to the wider assertion that the minds of people living in the 'free world' are being kept closed, and ignorant of anything like a world beyond this bloc's artifically imposed political and cultural borders with the outside. This is one of the finest late achievements of the left-wing folk music scene in the United States, which is of course the same world that Dylan was nurtured in, but eventually found too narrow in its vision and its range for his songwriting imagination.

I refuse to believe it. Sri Lanka - aided by bad light and rain - actually saved the Test. I wasn't daring hope that this might happen, and in all fairness it didn't look likely. 537/9 in the third innings in overcast conditions, with a tail wagging for all it's worth...wish I'd been there. Confirms all my belief in the superiority of Test cricket. And say what you will about the torpor of dull five-day matches without results, there's nothing that quite beats a really exciting drawn Test. Results like today do not only bear drama and nail-biting finishes, but also embody justice. A draw's one of the very few ways in which genuine justice can enter the world of sport. And this was a just result. The thought of Chaminda Vaas hanging on there for four and a half hours, the thought of Murali keeping fifteen balls out of his wicket and barely staving Hoggard off, the thought of poor Flintoff bowling with all the heart he has, for 51 overs, and not being able to beat the tail...and of course, the thought that with Jayasuriya back for the next Test, we might actually have a real series on our hands...these are exciting thoughts. Test cricket, I love you.

Went to Lord's yesterday, for a day of Test cricket between England and Sri Lanka. For a cricket fan this has to be a big moment, and it was, despite what seems to be an inevitable England victory. A beautiful ground despite the billboards, less-than-beautiful spectators sitting behind us who left beer cans and trash strewn in their wake as they left, and the redolence of international cricket's oldest history. An ambiguous experience. The stuffed shirts of the MCC strutting in and out of the Pavilion to which they had exclusive access, secure in their ownership of the venue and their claims to its 'traditions', a bunch of overfed gin-soaked Tories who couldn't be bothered to follow the day's cricket and left their reserved seats empty for the most part as crowds of genuine cricket-lovers thronged outside in vain. But not just that: also people watching avidly and formulating on-the-spot theories and prognoses, people sufficiently in love with the game to follow its intricate logic, the way it moved and shifted infinitesimally and produced its moments of beauty even as the (seemingly) inevitable result drew nearer.

And there was enough to thrill at in the day's cricket, regardless of the result tomorrow. An overcast morning, rain hovering in the air but staying teasingly at bay, and Matthew Hoggard produced lethal swinging deliveries - the swinging ball under a clouded sky being one of the ground's more wonderful traditions. Sri Lanka, starting at 91/6 against England's 551, looked like they'd fold before lunch, and I half-expected an innings defeat before the day was over. But Jayawardena batted beautifully, and the tail wagged. Tailenders are no longer clumsy hoickers: for each beautiful, crisp cover-drive by the captain, there was a similarly correct and elegant stroke by Vaas or Maharoof or Kulasekara, the latter two partly making up for their inability to make a mark with their bowling. The follow-on happened, but not without a certain recovery of dignity. And the rest of the day belonged to the Lankans: Sangakkara and Jayawardena had a century stand, and all of a sudden Hoggard didn't look quite as threatening, and Sajid Mahmood, who'd ripped through the middle order in the first innings, was driven and cut with mounting confidence. The sun came out after tea, and Lord's looked utterly beautiful as the ball raced off the bat across the green carpet of grass on the off-side, something that happened with mounting regularity as Sangakkara and Jayawardena carried out their fightback.

I always love watching Sri Lanka bat, and there's no team in the world I'd rather see as world champions - sadly, that won't happen for a while yet. But they rose to the occasion with spirit in the second half of the day. That continued today, and I wish I could have seen it. Today they avoided an innings defeat, the nightwatchman Maharoof making a half-century, and Jayawardena making what was from all accounts a magnificent hundred. I'm fantasizing about the tail wagging tomorrow and saving the match, or Murali taking nine for twenty or something similarly absurd, but it won't happen, much more likely that England will - deservedly - win by nine or ten wickets much before the day is through. Still, I saw a good day's cricket. Amazing, really, how there can be so much drama in an apparently dead match: batsmen fighting a losing cause and yet batting with complete command, a wicket falling at the close of day, and the sudden, unexpected tension produced by that. Flintoff steaming in with his remarkably varied repertoire at one end, Monty Panesar ambling in with his accurate and incisive left-arm spin at the other, fielders crowding in the slips and around the bat, the crowd building up momentum with its mounting applause and roars before each delivery in the final overs.

They love Monty. There's a touch of patronizing laughter in it: they love his inept fielding (and the poor man's worked on that! but the ball followed him all day, and he tried but fumbled and let a few by), his spindly clumsiness, and they love his turban, to them he's exotic and he's cute. One could sometimes get angry at this, were it not for the fact that English crowds have in the past been much more vicious: assaults upon dark-skinned cricketers, pigs' heads thrown into enclosures of Muslim women spectators, loaded racist abuse. I heard nothing overtly racist at all - as the demographics of English cricket change, attitudes also seem to be changing among audiences, imperfectly but positively. They love Monty: no one received half the cheers he did all day, not even 'Freddie' Flintoff. And one could hear the mockery transmute into something like admiration, as he belatedly took the ball and bowled a tantalizing spell, the best of the day. Nor was the laughter always tasteless: after he delivered the beauty that dismissed Tharanga for an excellent 52, a wag behind me yelled out 'now take a catch!'. Another followed up: 'and make an 'undred!' I cracked up.

And also the sprinkling of real aficionados: committed, nutty fans who've watched the game for decades and decades, and shower you with their reminiscences of bygone names. 'Keith Miller, now he was as hard-hitting a batsman as you could hope to see! But you know' - prodding me - 'if he had a weakness it was against top-class spin. Laker could get him, yes he could, on a turning wicket.' I felt thankful I knew cricket history reasonably well, having been through more than my fair share of cricketing fanaticism in my early teens. Laker? Laker of the 19 for 90 fame? Someone had watched Laker? Back in the 50s? I half-expected an old, dowdy-coated man to turn up nodding sagely and talking of Compton, or Larwood, or - why not? - Woolley. But it's this harvesting, and sharing, of memories that makes cricket - and all sports with their histories and their obsessive fandoms - special. Something as inconsequential as a six over the stands four decades ago stays in memory. Something as inconsequential as a game that takes five days to play and has the most intricate and inbred set of rules in the world can stir people to passionate reminiscence, and I don't know if it's just me, but I think that's beautiful. To delight in what is fundamentally trivial - as trivial as an unexpected harvest of wickets or a beautiful hundred, or even a single straight drive with its compressed glory - that's true cricket madness, true absurdity and true wisdom.

Cricket, sport in general, is not really inconsequential or trivial, of course. Many world-historical logics converge within it: class, capital in some of its ugliest forms, corruption, conservatism and entrepreneurialism, the creation of mass publics, and national partisanship, that double-edged sword that gives cricketing enthusiasm its bite but also its venom. But that can never be all there is; there are always moments at which the logic of a particular match takes over and creates hordes of spectators chattering themselves blue discussing the ins and outs of specific moments, with little regard for the moment for results and victors. Jayawardena drives Mahmood through the covers, the ball runs up against the billboard-lined boundary, and the woman and man sitting on my right, who I do not know, applaud the stroke and discuss his style, as though for that moment nothing else really mattered. Monty gets one to turn in really sharply, thinks he's found an edge, and appeals, only to be turned down, and huddled groups across the ground proffer their views, vocally, on the merits and demerits of the umpire's decision. Pleasures and excitements that will only last the day, for spectators at the ground and for people glued to their televisions and radios, all of whom will return, reluctantly, to the routines and rules of their everyday lives. But the world would be poorer without these pleasures.

Two pieces of writing that are on my mind at the moment. The first by a friend of mine, a near-accidental product of long and difficult meditations on the relationship between theory and practice, theory and knowledge, theory and reality. The other by Thompson, in The Poverty of Theory, his passionate vindication of historical knowledge and knowing. The two citations aren’t about the same thing, but I think they speak to and with each other. They do for me – long live the reader!

In Defiance

The word reality has been hounded out of language. Unless qualified by ten adjectives, twenty clarifications, and the customary footnotes signalling awareness of all theories of discursive deconstruction, its best left out of all projects of research. What is real? Is there a reality outside subjectivities? Can that reality be approximated, be represented? Is re-presented reality still original/real? And what is original anyway?

But what are we really talking about? The limits of process, experience, sensation or the limits of language in expressing it? Surely, pain is real. The rifle butt descending upon an unarmed protestor- it seems obscene to reduce it to an image. Real pain, with real consequences of blood and mashed bones, of dead and mutilated bodies. Surely, absence is real. The absence of food in the stomach, of money in the wallet, of blood in veins? And surely work is real- shapes conceived in air, given form through flesh and blood- real hands, wielding real tools giving shape to matter- welding, beating, burning, shaping, moulding or cutting- until ideas take shape in matter.

So when did we surrender? When did life surrender to the doubts of its voyeurs? When did the speakers start stammering in consideration to their audience? When was the consumer enthroned as the judge and the jury and the executioner of all that can be ever created? But more importantly, why? In no stage in human history has doubt ever been doubted. But we are its worshippers. We have enthroned it. And in doing so, in doubt we believe. In triumphing, we have been defeated.

(Uditi Sen)


For what a philosopher, who has only a casual acquaintance with historical practice, may glance at and dismiss, with a ferocious scowl, as ‘empiricism’, may in fact be the result of arduous confrontations, pursued both in conceptual engagements (the definition of appropriate questions, the elaboration of hypotheses, and the exposure of ideological attributions in pre-existing historiography) and also in the interstices of historical method itself.

(E.P. Thompson)

A dark, dry night in London last week. A friend and I were at Angel tube station, waiting for other friends to turn up so we could go to dinner. The street as crowded as ever, as pedestrians and buses and cars jostled for space and people poured out of the station with anxious, expectant or tired faces, their hunched shoulders signalling the end of another day, and the waiting for the comfort or dullness of home. J., my friend, was feeling cold, so she decided to stay inside the station. I felt dog-tired, it had been a long day, so I decided to go outside and sit on a bench. Sat down, looking at a starless sky and the facade of a big building in front of me, brown brick, full of offices and shops and hidden histories behind the facade.

A cough, deliberate and measured. A voice, saying something indistinct. I looked up at a man, asked him if he'd said something. 'I said, excuse me', he repeated with a touch of impatience, and sat down slowly and heavily beside me. A working man, I guessed, wearing an old coat, down on his luck but proud of his respectability. He stank of booze, but looked sober and mild. Glasses, squinting eyes, a frail body, not tall, not well. Pulled a notebook out of a pocket and a pencil out of another, gazed for a while at the building before us, and began to draw it, in wavering, unsteady strokes.

'Are you an artist?', I asked, for want of anything else to say. He looked at me for a while, and said, in slow, deliberate tones, 'I'm a carpenter.' Looked at me a little longer, as though to decide if I was mocking him. Satisfied that I wasn't, he began to speak.

'I draw for fun, you see. After work I come here, or go somewhere else, and take out this' - gestured to his notebook - 'and I draw.' He paused for a moment. 'I like drawing', he added, with great emphasis, as though to convince himself as well as me. 'I'm sure you do, and you're very good', I gabbled, but he wasn't listening.

'My girlfriend.' Pause. 'She threw me out of me house. My own house, you see? I got no money, and she - she threw me out. We had a fight. She threw me out. Her house, that'ud be ok. But my own flat. And she threw me out.' I murmured something indistinct and sympathetic. He carried on, looking at my face as he spoke.

'Now I'm waiting for a bus. I need 80p to get to my mum's house, that's all I need. I'll get it too. Don't you worry, I'll get it. And I got what's most important, mate - I got me beer. Most important thing.' Drew a can out of his inexhaustible pockets, opened it and winked at me. 'Just need 80p to get to me mum's place, too far t'walk from here, but I'll get there. I'll be fine, mate.' Looked at me again, too proud to ask for the money, and defiant.

I scrabbled around in my pockets, drew out a few coins. 'Here you go.' He took it at once. 'Thanks, mate. You're a gentleman.' Yes I am. A gentleman, that's why I'm handing you three copper coins when I could have given you enough for the tube and a dinner. A gentleman, that's why I'm washed out here after walking around central London doing nothing and you're here washed out after a day's hard labour, and a fight at home. And then he began, and even before he began I think I knew what the conversation would get around too.

'Women, son.' Deep sigh, an angry frown creasing his brow. 'You know women....you can't tell them anything. Never', - he leaned towards me confidentially - 'never tell a woman things, you know, you learn that in this life. They can't take it. Some words - don't use them. They can't take it, they can't. And most of all' - his voice grew louder now - 'don't use the C-word. You know what I'm talking about, mate?' I did, but I didn't want to. 'The C-word, you see. C-U-N-T. Never call a woman that, even if she's one. They make your life hell.' He subsided, sank back in his seat. 'Threw me out of my flat, she did that, yes she did. But I'll be fine.' And what did you do to her? I wondered. What else did you call her, how often, how many times a day? What had she done, spoiled your dinner? Kept you waiting? Had a headache? What would you have done had she called you a sod? A fuckwit? A poof? I'm only asking, you see, I don't know, I don't know your life and I never will. Hers neither. But you think I can understand you because we both have pricks, don't you? What makes you think that? What if I get up and walk away right now? Thoughts tumbled around in my head like leaves in a storm. I'd have liked to have met her too, you know. Known what she made of being called the C-word. Known what you'd done to her, what she'd done to you, what the two of you've done to each other over the years, months, days, minutes. But I'll nod quietly at whatever you say, what can I do? Give you feminist training, when all you have is a beer and my charity in your pocket? And other thoughts too, pushing uneasily against these. I have more coins, you know. I can walk home from here, I can take the tube, I can take a bus, I'm about to go for a nice Thai dinner that you'll never be able to afford, and they'd throw you out of the restaurant even if you could. That's what I am, you know. And this is what you are - you should hate me, really. But you like me, don't you, because I'm giving you 80p? Or is it because I'm listening to you? Tell me, mate, when was the last time anyone listened to you? Tell me about me, tell me what I am, tell me what you make of me, I must be strange to you as you are to me. And those words again, now as though he's lashing himself with them. 'Can't call your woman a cunt, you can't. Remember that, mate. Lessons in life. Forget them and you're done for.' 'Your' woman?

The storm subsided. He muttered something again about looking out for yourself, and staying clear of women, and I kept a poker face, I didn't laugh, I didn't cry. And then he began sketching again, and the conversation turned into something totally different. He drew like a child, but a child who knows he can be good some day. A child who wishes, perhaps, that he had more time to draw, but they want him at work again today till late. Grateful that we'd moved to safer ground, I asked him if he had to draw much as a carpenter. A stupid question. You can research the history of labour, yes you can, but you know nothing, do you? And he knows you know nothing, and he's being patient with you. 'No, I draw 'coz I like it, you see. My job, they give you plans, you build to those plans. Don't draw for that, but for me.' But he likes me because I'm listening, I'm not running away. He doesn't know I'm mining him for experience, using him as to figure this city out, he doesn't and won't know I'm writing about him now.

He's on to eyes now. 'I like drawing eyes. Not been drawing long, but I draw eyes, I like them, I paint them too.' There are two ways of drawing eyes, he tells me, see right here - a few jabs with his pencil and he's magically created an eye where there was blank white paper, and see right here again - the pencil moves again, shading an oval outline now, and we have an eye again. The irises, the pupils, the retina - he knows them all, and so does his pencil. He draws clumsily and not well, but he's doing magic, he's making things happen on this patch of paper that no one owns or rules but himself. Those hands set to work all day for the imaginations and profits of other men find their own zone of power at this time of evening, when he sits before tube stations and draws what he sees, drunk but steady, a steady hand, a steady eye. He's doing magic and he's proud of it. And despite myself I'm drawn in, we're talking about his art, he hasn't been at it long. 'But I'm getting better. I like it, you see.'

We're more relaxed now, though we've barely been speaking five minutes. 'Been a carpenter long?' I ask, conversationally. 'Thirty-two years', he replies. Seeing my eyes widen, he adds, 'Since I was a child, y'see. Used to help me dad, he was a carpenter too. Been carpentering since I was a child. I'm forty-two now, working for thirty-two years.'

'I'm a good carpenter', he adds after a while. The pride's quiet, but evident. The craftsman who works all day but is not just an eight-hour slave but also an artist, the man who's proud of what he does and creates, at work and in the evenings on his drawing-pad as crowds jostle in the city before him. 'I'm good at my work.' I'm sure you are. Are you the only one who knows it? Is there anyone who bothers to tell you that, even if they do know? Does that make you lonely? And then the conversation changes again.

'Thirty two years, yes. And I was in jail too, in the middle.' So he was in jail. Doesn't shock me much, I tell myself. Give me a few more years in Blair's Britain, and who knows, I may be mistaken for a Muslim and be slung in jail myself. 'How long?', I ask him. 'Ten years.' And then I ask, 'why were you in jail?' It seems natural to the conversation, flowing as it is, there are no secrets he wants to hold from me any more.

'For murder.' Casually, without a change of tone. Looks at me, without curiosity. Did my face change? I tried to make sure it didn't. 'Murder', he repeats. 'I killed someone', he says, unnecessarily. There's a pause, I don't know what to say. The smell of the beer's suddenly very strong. I look in his eyes, they're still mild and his frame's still weak. 'He was a burglar', he says, and leans back, as though exhausted.

What could I do? Strangely enough, I wasn't afraid of him - he wouldn't hurt a fly, I could see, though he'd killed a man and heaven knows what he'd done to his girlfriend, but at the moment he wanted to talk and wanted me to listen. But now I couldn't just get up and walk away, not once he'd told me this, because at some level, who knows, he may have been expecting me to do just that. Are we playing a game? Are we playing who-blinks-first? I latch on to his last comment. 'He was a burglar?' 'Yes, he'd have killed me if I hadn't shot first.' I look shocked. 'But then it's manslaughter - they gave you ten years for that? For self-defence?' He's pleased, I'm speaking a language he likes. He's been a convict, for Christ's sake, who knows the law better than him? Explains, with genuine, disinterested intellectual clarity, the British legal system's distinctions between murder and manslaughter to me, how he'd been tried for murder and got away with manslaughter, but still got ten years. Looks at me again, for the first time with curiosity. 'You're an Indian, aren't you? You'll be knowing about the British legal system, then.' Outwardly, I grin at him, 'yes I am.' Inwardly: now how the fuck do you know that? Next you'll be saying you know I'm researching the history of law! He doesn't, thankfully. He's remembering his days in jail. 'Learnt a lot there, mate. I had some good times, I had some bad times.' He coughs, loudly. I venture a question. 'Was it hard getting to work after coming out of prison? Did they make it hard for you?' He smiles, pretty much for the first time. 'Oh, I got around them.' That look of pride again. And why not? How many of your friends are on the dole? You got around them, and good for you too. My congratulations. But inevitably, other thoughts. Was he really a burglar? Did you want to watch him die? Did he try to kill you too, or were you making that up? Was there anyone else you ever killed?

I look up, and my friends are walking towards me. They look at us curiously, and wait politely for the conversation to finish. I end it clumsily, though part of me wants to stay. 'Er...my friends are here. I have to go. Nice meeting you, er...' Fucking hell, I don't even know your name. But you don't care. He looks up and sees three women. His views on women suddenly flash through my panicking mind. But nothing. He smiles, a bit weirdly but not unpleasantly. A beery drawl, now. 'Hello, girls.' 'Hello', they reply, tentatively. I hold out my hand quickly, and wish him all the best. 'Thank you, mate, it was good talking to you', he says, shakes my hand, and then I'm gone, we're off the road towards dinner.

I looked back once, and he was still there as we headed round a corner, head sunk into his drawing pad, his pencil sketching out buildings and faces and eyes, for the moment quite happy in his world. A working man, a murderer, a weak and frail person on a bench near a station, doodling, 80p in his pocket, an ex-convict, a small-built and short-sighted man waiting for a bus to come along to take him to his mum.

I've felt for a while that I should blog about the Jantar Mantar agitations in Delhi that came to a head recently, the Narmada agitation in particular. But it's difficult to, since issues that press upon your mind and heart so strongly are very difficult to write about. The guilt of distance and the immediacy of the issue combine in strange ways, and produce not only anger but a certain numbness, the numbness that accompanies the revelation of naked, unashamed injustice. Others have written about these issues, blogged about them too, with much greater competence than I could possibly do. But I'll try.
Two major movements for justice and survival, both of them desperate and nearing the end of their tether, converged on Jantar Mantar over the last month. Victims of the toxic gases released at the Union Carbide factory in Bhopal in December 1984, accompanied by large numbers of their supporters, carried out a month-long march to Delhi to protest against the state's refusal to offer them protection and compensation, in the form of a sustained factory clean-up, provisions of clean drinking water not contaminated by toxic waste, and action against the company responsible for the death of over 20,000 people, and the medical disasters that have hit thousands and thousands more. Their demands were not met, they were not met by the Prime Minister, and so, having marched 800 km to Delhi to make claims and demands of indisputable justice, they decided to go on a hunger strike. Alongside them were their neighbours in victimhood, from the same part of the country. These were victims of another disaster - people displaced by the Sardar Sarovar dam on the Narmada, protesting against the decision to raise the height of the dam, yet again, without making provisions for the relief and rehabilitation of the oustees. Medha Patkar, the leader of the Narmada Bachao Andolan, the most important social movement in contemporary India, embarked, at the same time as the Bhopal protestors, on a fast unto death to pressurize the government towards action. Action, predictably, was taken in the form of police lathicharges, arrests of demonstrators and hunger strikers and sympathetic activists and students, the hysteric campaigns of both the Gujarat BJP and Congress, and the counter-protests of sections of the media bent on demonizing the NBA as a movement that was 'holding the government to ransom' with their demands. Evict several hundred thousand people from their homes, submerge their villages and forests, flush them out of their habitations like rats, refuse to offer them anything resembling humane compensation, and of course you're the ones being held to ransom when they let out a yap of protest. It is, after all, always the Great Indian Middle Class that suffers, everyone below them is merely battening on the state for undeserved privileges. Beggars, displaced people, slumdwellers, industrial casualties, the unemployed - spoilsports who refuse to play up to the still persistent hallucination of India Shining.
I know how hopelessly rhetorical that last sentence was. It's anger, anger and helplessness, that makes me write like this. At moments like this you realize that the government you enthusiastically helped vote into power differs from its fascist predecessors only on certain issues, that when it comes to 'development' the state essentially remains the State, untainted by anything remotely approaching compassion for the human casualties of its projects. And I voted for this government, and would do so again, because the alternative is too nightmarish to bear to live with.
Perhaps, though, I'm exaggerating the case. Because these two remarkable, admirable social movements didn't return to their bases without hope. They suffered through the fasting and protests, the police beat them and made them bleed, and Medha Patkar carried on her hunger strike almost to the point of death, for 19 days. But at the end of all of this, both movements gained something.
The Bhopal protestors have gone back happier than they have been in a long, long time. It is true that the victims will not see Dow Chemicals and Union Carbide punished. That will not happen. Big business in India will never pay for its acts of criminal negligence, not even if it produced the biggest industrial disaster in history. But the Bhopal marchers returned with promises that the contaminated water they and their children have grown up drinking will be cleaned up, that action will be taken to clean up the factory site, that steps will be taken to make sure that the mountain of corpses and half-corpses stops piling up.
Promises. Merely promises. And of course the Manmohan Singh government will not honour its pledges, of course the marchers will be back, in some form or another, to claim the justice that is theirs by right, and the survival that being human, and being alive, entitles them to. Don't keep murdering us. That, in essence, is the only real demand the Bhopal survivors have been making. The murder won't stop, despite the happiness they rightly feel at the government's recent concessions (please check out www.bhopal.net, and the marchers' blog on it). But at some level a victory was won - the government was shamed into token concessions, and the movement for the Bhopal victims will continue, and can draw some heart from this. Networks of support have sprung up, over the years, among activist organizations, NGOs, university groups of teachers and students, and the rare but crucial honest journalist. That does mean something - not victory by a long shot, but an advance of sorts. And what has been acknowledged, though mostly grudgingly and covertly, is the scale of the suffering that continues in areas affected by the poisonous gases from the factory, and reproduces itself, through deformities, disease and death, down generations. This recognition of suffering is symbolically of great consequence for a movement that has no weapons except arguments, facts and the capacity to invoke moral outrage.
With the NBA, matters are different. The hunger strike was not an ineffectual one, but matters remain incredibly grim. A ministerial team headed by Saifuddin Soz was dispatched to investigate the process of rehabilitation. Soz found, of course, that there is no such process except on paper, and was too honest to conceal that, as the Prime Minister undoubtedly wanted him to do. The matter was referred to the Supreme Court, and the statement it issued was equivocal. Dam construction was not stopped, but the legitimacy of the demand for proper rehabilitation was partially conceded. One would think there's a logical contradiction between these two decisions, given that each increase in the dam's height flushes out more and more people by the thousands, and given the current state of rehabilitation work in Madhya Pradesh. Still, given the Supreme Court's shameful history on the Narmada issue, it came as something of a relief that the judges were willing to concede that oustees had the right to live as human beings. I personally was surprised. Medha Patkar broke her fast, and the movement now waits, making use of a very short break from relentless pressure to draw breath, recoup, and re-strategize. The next SC hearing is on 1 May, I think. May Day: wouldn't that be a great occasion for the state to make another attempt to destroy a movement of the poor and dispossessed? Or perhaps not, perhaps things will be different. One lives in hope.
But this wasn't all. The government seems to have pretty much washed its hands of Soz's report, though it had commissioned it. Soz went beyond his brief, clearly, telling his masters more than they wanted to know. And the central government developed cold feet following a sustained, vicious campaign by politicians from Gujarat. The full fury of Gujarat politics has been unleashed upon the Narmada protestors, and there's no greater and more destructive fury in all of Indian politics, as the 2002 pogroms taught us. The Gujarat Congress and BJP joined hands in demonizing Medha Patkar and her peaceful army of protestors. The NBA's office in Vadodara was ransacked, not the first time this committedly non-violent movement (who, of course, are 'holding the nation to ransom') has been subjected to such intimidation. Modi declared he was going on a fast to counter Medha Patkar's propaganda, and would not give up till the government had issued a clear 'no' to the NBA. So as Narmada protestors sweltered in the heat of Jantar Mantar without food, Modi leaned back in an airconditioned cubicle and threatened not to eat. How much blood does this man want on his hands? The government, of course, began shitting in their pants, especially since the Gujarat Congress threw their weight behind the sanghis in their demand for the fulfilment of the world's most reviled hydro-electric project.
Aamir Khan, bless him, who expressed sympathy with the victims of the dam, has been subject to similar demonization. The baboons of the Congress and BJP who ransacked the NBA's office also burnt his posters and tried to ban his films. Once again, the same strategies. Single out prominent individuals who have been involved with or expressed concern for the victims of this holocaust. Isolate a few names - Medha Patkar, Aamir Khan (who did nothing more than visit the protestors and offer them some sympathy), and of course most of all Arundhati Roy, who has come to represent Mephistopheles in the imagination of the Indian middle-class Right. Insinuate, without a scrap of evidence, that these individuals are doing what they do, saying what they say, writing what they write, from interested motives, for profit or for brownie points. Suggest, thereby, that these manipulative, scheming crypto-Commie propagandists not only represent but are the movement, and it becomes easier to ignore the thousands of human beings, directly affected by the project, who are the real object of fear and hatred. Their collective weight becomes transformed, by a gigantic act of manipulated and deceptive representation, into a show-trial list of familiar and famous people, people who've worked ceaselessly and tirelessly for the movement, and in Medha Patkar's case are pivotal to it, but who in actuality are not the movement, for the movement involves masses of people. And this mass involvement is what has to be denied and made invisible, each time a mobilization happens.
This, however, is ultimately impossible. Which is why, once again, the Narmada movement has managed, against the odds, to win a temporary stalemate. 'Win' is a peculiar word to use, but in the case of this movement, at this stage of exhaustion and despair, not being terminated entirely is victory, of a kind, though a very grim kind. Both sets of battles - that concerning Bhopal and that concerning the Narmada - have followed a particular logic over the last month or so, and I think this logic is going to be repeated as the despair and urgency of movements for social justice in India intensifies. In both cases, a mobilization on an apocalyptic scale, declarations of 'victory or death', strategic launchpads for a sustained pressure campaign. On the side, frenetic lobbying, appeals, pleas to be heard, mobilizations of sympathizers across the country and especially in Delhi. A staking out of physical territory in the heart of India's capital, close to the centre of power. The strategic use of a fragile but enormous moral power, through invocations of traditions of non-violent protest and satyagraha, that despite the seeming unlikelihood of this manages to jostle the government from its committed unconcern just a little. The state responds through equivocation, scared by the scale of anger and bitterness, scared also by the monumental patience of these resistance movements that simply refuse to die away, but equally scared by - and ideologically on the same wavelength as - mobilizations on its right. A hard-line refusal to do anything bends into a nervous set of equivocations and self-contradictory statements, but never bends all the way towards an acknowledgement of the real suffering of either the Bhopal or Narmada victims. Both movements retreat, but strategically, on what appears to be at least partly their own terms. This could provide limited time and energy to recoup a little, and at least there are now formal, written commitments that can be used as evidence against the state when it dishonours its pledges again, as it's bound to do. It all sounds very paltry, but for the moment it'll have to do.
In the meantime, of course, there are children and adults still dying of toxic poisoning, there are tribals and villagers being forced off their lands as dam waters rise and drown centuries of human habitation, there are the corpses of people, homes and failed hopes that bob up and down on dam waters and float around in air contaminated by industrial waste, there are ghosts of factory workers and dispossessed men and women who've starved or drowned, and there are policemen who specialize in drawing the blood and breaking the bones of protestors from both movements. There are also the state governments of both Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh, both of which are run by the BJP and the first of which is the most murderous in independent India's history. These aren't good times for people in these states to mobilize in campaigns that'll immediately be labelled as anti-national and unpatriotic, a labelling that'll be fully backed by rags like The Pioneer and, in most of its moods, the TOI.
But there's another side, and it's this: these mobilizations have gone on far too long, and have moved enough people and caused enough others to think, to simply vanish, whatever the overt and hidden forms of repression they're subjected to. And these causes, therefore, aren't entirely lost yet. Which, I suppose, is not to be forgotten easily.

Victory. The new French employment law that Villepin was trying to pass has been scrapped. They took on the French state, they took on the power of business, and they won. I still can't get my head around it. But this calls for celebration.

Are those patterns of sound actually in his head? Before they make their way down those nerves that stop at his fingers, are they in his head? The fingers - by what strange, studiously practised yet wild alchemy do they know each vibration, each note, each tone, each juxtaposition they tease out of the fretboard? The guitar itself is alive, throbbing and sparkling with colours and light. Garcia's on his guitar.

Garcia's on his guitar. The world's condensed into this river of sound that swirls around his instrument. The world flows from his guitar. This is worship. This is faith. I'm crazy.

And it's just air, Christ, just air, twisted and stretched and bent, air changed by magic into sound, air thick with smoke and marijuana and the sound of Garcia's audience clapping its hands, all air, but air bent on paths that are accidental, improvised, and invented.

Like every teenager who ever had a passionate affair with sixties rock and its offspring, I dreamed, several years back, of myself on a stage, bending air with a guitar, exploring the stratosphere with my fingers as they hopped across a fretboard. But, unusually, it wasn't Hendrix or Page or Clapton I imagined myself as, the guitar an extension of the body, following and shaping the body's rules and patterns. It was, instead, Garcia, his fingers imparting to his guitar a life and magic all its own, the musician almost audience to his own performance, his flight of creation. The pain compressed in that index finger that Garcia severed, one day, as he was chopping wood, mingled with the sweetness coming from that fusion of brain, fingers and strings. The beautiful, sweet, bearded face. It was always Garcia.

Garcia playing and singing 'I Shall Be Released'. And it kicks in, as it was bound to do sometime. The power and the genius of Dylan, behind Garcia as he transforms the song into something it had always and never been. It's only words. Released. Only a word, but a word with such resonance. History, desire and prophecy mingled in that word, in the voice that gives it resonance and depth. Words, but words from Dylan.

Garcia on guitar. Dylan reinventing song. The closest I'll ever come to religion.

And I was always too lazy - too afraid of being no good? - to ever learn the guitar.

An extract from a poem by Seamus Heaney, 'Weighing In', from The Spirit Level:

To refuse the other cheek. To cast the stone.
Not to do so some time, not to break with
The obedient one you hurt yourself into

Is to fail the hurt, the self, the ingrown rule.
Prophesy who struck thee! When soldiers mocked
Blindfolded Jesus and he didn't strike back

They were neither shamed nor edified, although
Something was made manifest - the power
Of power not exercised, of hope inferred

By the powerless forever. Still, for Jesus' sake,
Do me a favour, would you, just this once?
Prophesy, give scandal, cast the stone.

Two sides to every question, yes, yes, yes....
But every now and then, just weighing in
Is what it must come down to, and without

Any self-exculpation or self-pity.

March 2006: labour in the world.

The United Kingdom: Major strike over cuts in pensions to local government employees under the LGPS (Local Government Pensions Scheme). Other government employees, those not covered by this scheme, are not facing a similar axe. Over a million public-sector employees are having their pensions reduced or being forced to work longer. UNISON, TGWU, NUJ, NUT and other unions are working together on this strike, which is supposedly the largest since the General Strike.
Thatcher, when she introduced a compulsory secret ballot for trade union decisions, was roundly opposed for interfering with the internal functioning of unions. And it’s true that she did this as a move to defeat working-class organization and militancy. But in the long run, it may have backfired, and accomplished more good than harm. Unions have in recent years swung back heavily to the left, even though their membership has shrunk in an age of casualization. And the legitimacy of the left-wing dominance of many unions, achieved through the most democratic means available, is not under a cloud. And in cases like the present strike, where the ballots have unambiguously turned out a vote for sustained industrial action, the extent to which the real and represented interests of public-sector workers coincide is much clearer than it would otherwise have been. The consensus seems to be: strike. And all the best to it, too. The whole wide world is watchin’, as Dylan once wrote.

France: Violent labour protests, involving the burning of cars and massive demonstrations, protesting the Villepin government’s decision to pass a law making it easier for employers to fire new hires in the first two years of employment – a form of ‘flexible employment’. This has tied in, once again, as in May 68, but perhaps more comprehensively in terms of actual interests, with student protest. Students are among those directly affected by the government’s decision, so the Sorbonne is occupied, and the occupation continues as I write (28 March) – so well over a fortnight, at the least. It’s interesting, the way radical movements invoke their past through oblique coded references – the student occupiers of the Sorbonne are circulating pamphlets, redolent with Situationism, soixante-huitard Maoism, and articulations of Marcuse with post-structuralism. May 68 is invoked, time and again – but, in a revealing turn of phrase, not as the revolution that happened, but ‘that which did not’.
I feel ambiguous. There’s a thrill when one reads passages like this. Legitimacy belongs to those who believe in their actions, to those who know what they are doing, and why they are doing it. This idea is obviously opposed to that of the State, majority and representation. It does not submit to the same rationales, it imposes its own rationales. If the politicizing consists in a struggle of different legitimacies, of different ideas of happiness, our task from now on is to give means to this struggle with no other limit but what appears to us to be just and joyful. This is an excerpt from a communiqué from the Sorbonne Occupation Committee in Exile (murmurs of ’68? A nod to Marcos and the Zapatistas? The language resonates..). It’s thrilling because in the middle of a difficult, meaningful struggle, the philosophic basis for a challenge to the hegemony of the French state and its apparatuses, as well as the apparatuses of global capitalism, is being articulated. It need not refer directly to the issue at hand in formulating its poetics: the point is that a poetics is being spoken, written, invented, as the movement continues. The colours and smells and feels of the occupation, of the labour protests, are invoked, in what is effectively an appeal to an international, virtual, online audience. There is a refusal of logics that many of us have thought, in moments of despair, to be hegemonic to the point of drowning the possibility of any kind of counter-hegemony. Something is opening here, and it is welcome.
But there is an unease, too – perhaps that is unavoidable in a time when the openness of the future seems, for once, demonstrable? – as I read lines like this. The scorn for the procedures of ‘democratic majority’ is more than a sneer at the vacillations and compromises of ‘bourgeois’ democracy. The principles of democratic voting, representation, and collective consultation, replaced in this radical discourse by a poetics of invention and affirmation, were not ‘granted’ by ‘capitalist democracy’, but wrested by patient and strategic deployments of all kinds of oppositional power – working-class, feminist, minority. The easy contempt and dismissal of these in the Sorbonne communiqué worries me. All that space given to the general assemblies paralyses us and only serves to confer legitimacy on paper to a bunch of wannabe bureaucrats. Well, yes, this can often be true. But is the answer as simple as this – It is part of our struggle to limit, as much as possible, the tyranny of the majority vote? That this vote can often be tyrannical, and run counter to the democracy it supposedly embodies, is not in question. Yet should we not also worry, especially given some of the historical trajectories of the Left, about the concrete accountability of movements, however radical and democratic in principle, to real, embodied interests and opinions? Even if this causes delays and fumbling and bickering, given the history of the Left, it seems to me necessary and unavoidable to institute and maintain mechanisms of accountability to something that has more flesh than a spectral idea, a logic of poetic invention, a conceptually watertight philosophic agenda. I’m not suggesting for a moment that that is what is actually happening in France now – it’s just that communiqués of this sort (and this is precisely their strength, their wonder) do and must always provoke arguments and tensions of the kind I’ve just mentioned.

India: Murmurs. Merely murmurs. But a Business Standard report, from January, seems unnerved. ‘…the sight of 400 Toyota Kirloskar workers blocking the entrance to the Deputy Labour Commissioner’s office in Bangalore before a scheduled “peace” meeting between the management and the unions on Monday was unnerving.
‘For it brought back fears of another Black Monday in July last year when protests by Honda Motor employees took a violent turn.’
These euphemisms make me mad. The ‘violent turn’ so coyly mentioned was this: the police at Gurgaon brutally beat up protesting workers, locked them up, and the government looked on. This escalated, and the campaign by the workers, which had initially begun because of the harassment and humiliation of employees by employers, came to be backed, with some success, by the Left. The Business Standard regretfully notes: ‘Apart from the dispute in Honda, there were several other examples of industrial unrest in 2005. And in each of these cases, the management had to beat a hasty retreat.’ Instances mentioned are Tata Motors and Apollo Tyres. One could add to this the defeated, but powerful, strike by airport workers recently, and the 60-million strong countrywide Left-organized strike last winter.
What is happening here? In general, the work-days lost due to strikes in India have gone down considerably, with the spread of casualization and flexible employment, and the expansion of an already overwhelmingly dominant un-unionized sector, because of the shrinking of the organized working class. But over the last couple of years – interestingly, since the assumption of power by a Congress-led coalition backed by the Left – industrial militancy seems to be on the rise. Part of the reason for this is the increased radicalism of the organized Left on a national scale (despite the repressiveness and corruption of the Left Front ministry in West Bengal, whose politics often seem directly at odds with those of the Politbureau). Part of the reason, perhaps, is that the (temporary) decline of the RSS, reflected in the prolonged crises of the BJP, have shifted, for the moment at least, the terms of political discourse. Social conflicts have displaced the politics of Hindu identity from centre-stage for the moment, though the question of which of these political fields has deeper roots and greater resilience is still open.
Perhaps this can be said about the Manmohan Singh government, disappointing though it is on so many counts: real contradictions are visible again in the practice of government and politics, and this is for the better. As opposed to a Hindutva-managed coalition government whose right-wing reaction was uncomplicated and forceful, the political mobilizations and initiatives embodied in the decisions of the current government flow from divergent ideological streams, and are juxtaposed in uncomfortable relationships. We have an uneasy and hesitant articulation of mild social progressivism (protection for victims of domestic abuse), very minimal welfarism (the Employment Guarantee Act), continued economic neo-liberalism (the desperation to strike deals with the US, the commitment to whittling down public welfare and security in the pursuit of increased economic growth) and anti-communalism. To a limited extent, the state has emerged as a battleground of contending political interests and commitments, as a democratic state should. In the reign of the BJP, contrary to this, state, party, and government meshed in frightening ways – Gujarat exemplified this. I am uncomfortably reminded, as I write this, that this elision of the functions of different political apparatuses has achieved near-full form in West Bengal, where a government that describes itself as left-wing rules with an arbitrary, corrupt and reactionary politics. West Bengal will not witness Gujarat-like slaughter, because the CPM, at its worst, cannot compare with the RSS. That does not, however, make its rule defensible.
Labour politics seem to be headed in an uncertain upward trajectory for the moment in India, then, though this of course is part of a story of general decline and confusion. Whether or not unions and movements will devise more imaginative and far-sighted strategies is an open question. It’s a difficult job to accomplish.

Argentina: Factory occupations continue, well into their third year by now. Zanon factory seems to be doing well. Over 300 factories are under worker control. Will it spread, will it collapse under weight and inexperience, will it stay static? The future’s opened, just a crack, but it’s opened. Peronism, socialism, anarcho-syndicalism, workerism: strange bedfellows, but bedded together they seem to be, in this suddenly new world. The occupations are revolutionary by any standards, but they persistently explore the possibilities of the law and of democracy, turning these into positive, affirmative arrangements, pushing for recognition and stabilization through them – for instance, pressing successfully to get the law to recognize the legitimacy of expropriation of factories and the establishment of worker control.
Factory occupations: the strangest reversal of one of the most persistent logics of capital. Everything tamed and organized under the reign of capital repeats its own shape, but in radically bloated, disfigured forms, forms that can appear only as monsters to the interests of capital. The worker who is committed to his job, who under the scrutiny of manager and employer is the best kind of slave, picks up her tools and gets to work when employers no longer require her services, and are trying to dispense with them. And in the process, starts thinking about better ways of organizing work, more justice in the regimes that regulate her labour. Democratic voting. Equalized wages. Work safety. The abolition of private, personal profit. Accountable distributions of the wealth produced. The relations of production, to reverse the terms of an old Marxist speculation, can no longer be contained, in their trajectory, by the forces of production – employers, managers, assembly lines and workshops. Justice, in hesitant, half-articulated, but immense forms, creeps over day-to-day management, and there’s a darkness on the edge of capital’s horizon.
But, after all, only a small darkness, only a small blot. This must not be forgotten. This isn’t victory, even temporary, or anything like it. To repeat: the future’s opened, or at least a dream of it has. But dreams can disappear at a moment’s notice: the twentieth century demonstrated that with chilling effect. How can vigilance be maintained in the middle of a dream? By accepting the paradox, and by pushing it forward and onward.

Here's a dead document. A murmur of the past, a disaffected ghost wandering in a dank and blind darkness.

To secure for all the workers by hand or by brain the full fruits of their industry and the most equitable distribution thereof that may be possible upon the basis of the common ownership of the means of production, distribution and exchange, and the best obtainable system of popular administration and control of each industry or service.

This is as adeqate a definition of socialism as we have ever had. Marx certainly never came up with anything as adequate as this. And it was once the official line of a party. Stranger still, many of this party's leading figures, and thousands of its workers, actually believed it and worked to make it true. This was once clause 4 of the Labour Party's constitution, adopted in 1918, and axed seventy seven years later by Blairite New Labour. Of course, at one level this was only words. The Labour Party, such as it was, never really lived up to this clause. In practice it was often authoritarian, corrupt, venal and unprincipled. But words, before they're erased, can act as a bad conscience, and in this case the bad conscience of the Party was embodied in people who pushed, tirelessly, for the actualization of these words through lives committed to their organization. People who felt, and had reason to feel, that their party could be different, that it could be what it had promised to be. People who, before they left or were hounded out by Blair's masquerading corporate mafia, represented Left Labour, a fraction that no longer exists.

Labour's been funded now, as we all know, by some of the richest men in the country. The party that was created to represent and fight for an enormous and exploited working class is now run by the purse-strings of Lord Sainsbury. Secret meetings, clinking champagne glasses, deals that are eagerly grasped and signed, old school ties. This is the time for nightmares. Nightmares where the faces of the most powerful people in the world weld into a single face, into a single, grinning, triumphant muscular contortion. Blair. Bush. Berlusconi. Behind the spin doctors, behind the screaming headlines, the same monster of many faces. Blair. Bush. Berlusconi. And so many more.

Two of my closest friends in London spent years working for the Labour Party. Through its compromises and its rightward turns, they found it in themselves to believe that it was possible to make this a party of genuine democratic socialism, that it was worth fighting for, to use a cliched phrase, the soul of the party. And that it was possible to be in this organization while keeping one's principles, personal and political, intact. History was open. The future was open. Through Wilson and Callaghan, through the nightmare of Thatcherism, they worked to give democracy some meaning, to argue, with reason and patience, that being socialist could mean something inside this organization. There was, above all, there must have been, the sense of being within a movement, within something living and pregnant with possibility, despite all the abuses and betrayals and compromises that dogged its history. And there is no headiness to quite compare with that.

Needless to say, the time came when these hopes of the Party died. New Labour had no place for people like this. For visions like this are the most dangerous of all for a party that has decided to move to the Right. Preachy, bombastic, 'loony-left' manifestos can be endured. What cannot be endured by a party like this is people working, strategically and ethically, working responsibly towards a durable justice. There were hundreds, thousands of people in Britain who believed in this vision, who worked to give it flesh. They're gone too, and those that aren't will go. There has to come a point when staying will be impossible, when living with oneself in this organization, in this grotesque parody of social democracy, will be beyond endurance.

Something new will be born from this. Something that's already moving and murmuring, not sure of its shape or its size, its form or its meaning. Something that could be ugly, something that could be beautiful. Something growing from despair, something growing from hope. Something that may be defeated, something that may win. And both the defeats and the victories could end up being reversed. History doesn't die. No, not even when it's been murdered.

Has any rock musician invoked the powers of lament as powerfully as Bruce Springsteen? I was listening, just now, to 'Something in the Night', a track from Darkness on the Edge of Town. There's this terrifying wail that begins the song, a long, many-toned howl of lamentation that flattens my veins and freezes my blood. And punctuates the song, again and again. Then there are these words:

When we found the things we'd loved

They were crushed and dying in the dirt.

We tried to pick up the pieces

And get away without getting hurt.

'Factory', another song from the same album, vocalizes another sense of loss, another source of mourning.

Through the mansions of fear, through the mansions of pain

I see my daddy walking through them factory gates in the rain.

Factory takes his hearing, factory gives him life,

The working, the working, just the working life.

Lament. Lament gives Springsteen his force: the force of mourning, and also, peculiarly, the redemptive anger and energy that bleeds out of it. The Ghost of Tom Joad (his best album, I think) is a lament for the American working class and its lives and deaths. Its most moving moments, though, come in invocations of landscapes of sky and wind and forests and springs, of friendship and love that lie 'where pain and memory have been stilled / There across the border.' A lament which seeks to regenerate. A voice and music which, for this very reason, will never deny or understate loss.

Lament as regeneration, and as force. The young man who feels 'so weak I just want to explode / Explode and tear this town apart / Take a knife and cut out this pain from my heart' decides, when the moment of decision arrives, to do something else. Weld his losses together and do something unexpected. Something new.

Gonna be a twister to blow everything down

That ain't got the faith to stand its ground.

Blow away the dreams that tear you apart
Blow away the dreams that break your heart

Blow away the lies that leave you nothing

but lost and brokenhearted.

He strides off into the storm, looking for his promised land.

And all of this comes from sadness, from loss, from mourning. From lament.

How is power legitimated? How are the most brutal, routinized acts of mass repression normalized and naturalized? It never ceases to amaze me that a state which has over a half-century practised torture and genocide in the pursuit of imperial goals and profits, a state in which racial segregation was institutionalized till into the second half of the century, where there has been a history of witch-hunts, where elections have been rigged and most of the lower-income population votes with its feet, can be held up as an exemplar of democracy. How does this work?

This is not to claim any status of particular evil for the United States, just to point to the constitutive violations of democracy and human rights that its statecraft and politics, national and international, are composed of. Of course brutal regimes cannot be compared easily on a scale of ten. The postwar and post-colonial world teems with examples: Iran of the Ayatollahs, Pinochet's Chile, Fujimori's Peru, the Taliban's Afghanistan, apartheid South Africa, Suharto's Indonesia, Pol Pot's Cambodia. But the point is that if anyone were to get up and systematically argue that Pol Pot or Pinochet were benvolent democratic heads of state, they'd be hooted out of the hall. The same doesn't happen when Condoleeza Rice or Rumsfeld make speeches about the United States' role in making this a freer world. Or, to take another pertinent case, it doesn't happen when someone defends Israel's apartheid wall.

How does this really work? The crude answer is that power justifies all, but that still begs the question - how? 'Hegemony', in the Gramscian sense, describes the situation well, but there are micro-strategies still to be explained.

Take popular cinema. Take an example of a film that's actually much more sensitive and intelligent than one would have expected, Spielberg's Munich. The film is a tortured condemnation of Israel, a state with which Spielberg has often claimed solidarity. The Mossad agents who set out to avenge Munich and track down Palestinian terrorists are, most of them, men with a conscience, capable of moral complexity and self-doubt, and this comes through even as Spielberg peels away the layers behind which their pathologies, and their state's pathology, rest. The film ends with the central protagonist, used by his state to commit murders his conscience cannot rest with, refusing Israel, refusing to commit himself to it any more. It ends with the moving invocation of an alternative, cosmopolitan, hospitable Jewishness against the hardness and closure of Zionism. And none of this can be faulted - the fact that the Mossad agents are men with consciences and not depraved monsters only enriches the film and makes it more complex. (Though the idea of Mossad agents risking their security and agenda in a desperate rush to save a little Palestinian girl from dying accidentally in one of their assassination attempts is, frankly, laughable.) Spielberg, to his credit, tries not to demonize the Palestinian terrorists he shows either. But they are, clearly, fanatics and nothing more. Their grievances are real, their longing for a home movingly portrayed. But they are walk-ons, cardboard figures, they are not people with children and fears and self-doubt and psychological complexities. They want their justice, and nothing will deter them. They are single-minded, they suffer from none of the weaknesses the Mossad agents do. And so, despite Spielberg's major advance upon the simple Manicheanisms of Hollywood, and his attempts to pierce the human truths of the Israel-Palestine predicament, he cannot. The adversaries are not made of the same human flesh and hearts, though the discourse of much of the film tries to affirm that they are.

Constantly, in media much cruder than Hollywood, which on the whole is far more sophisticated than Fox News, the same discursive trajectory emerges. Who are the people you will allow doubt, guilt, self-revulsion, self-questioning, the richness and openness of divided selves? Which side are they on? And who will emerge, on the other side, as Manichean-minded, ruthless, single-minded, the embodiments of the simplicity and horror of undivided selves? The CIA agent can be a man with kids and mortgages and fear and guilt, he can be a victim too. Not so the suicide bomber, who must only be a suicide bomber and nothing beyond, who must be reduced to the one function that defines and delimits his humanity. Why is Vietnam, the one imperial war which can be subjected to any kind of generally acceptable internal critique in mainstream American media, the subject of a 'debate', while 9/11 is the act that defies understanding, the act that can justify the substitution of war for debate and argument? It's the same logic at work.

Which is why George Clooney's new film, Syriana, is such a welcome step. Within the giant web of the military-state-corporate entanglements that structure the politics of the Middle East and tie these to America, the film delves into four situations, in both the United States and the Middle East, and describes the ways in which these work themselves out both through the articulation of political power on a giant scale, and in the micro-physics of real people's lives and experiences. Clooney as the CIA assassin who emerges as a tragic figure dying in a failed attempt at self-redemption, is particularly striking, and unusual. The Pakistani migrant labourer who is sucked into the world of suicide terrorists is potentially the richest character in the film, though it's true to Hollywood in the sense that this is the most imperfectly realized of the four converging plot-lines. But he is a young migrant labourer with a fresh face whose father loves him dearly, who's been made redundant by a corporate oil merger affecting jobs in both the Middle East and the United States, and who fears his death. The kind of figure it is risky to flesh out in Hollywood in these terms. If Clooney is returning mainstream Hollywood to the possibilities of a progressive left-liberal politics that McCarthyism first, and the Reaganite 1980s second, had all but eroded, this is something to be excited about. I haven't seen Good Night and Good Luck yet, but from all accounts it works fantastically well. These are minor blows against the edifice of self-legitimation that American mainstream political culture is built on. But they do good and not harm, and in Bush and Haliburton's America, that's reason enough for celebration.

Cromer Street. Again. Late afternoon. Quieter today, no racist tramps outside the church, people about their business, walking through the streets, running their shops, kids stalking past in bad imitations of hoods. Before the road ends, a huge scaffolding locked into a tall building. There's work happening here, something's being built. The usual notices are up. SCAFFOLDING ALARMED - I always have a good laugh at that. CAUTION - MEN AT WORK OVERHEAD. That's another one. Something's coming up here, and a closer glance at the billboards tells me what it is. It's a 'creative arts centre', advertising ACTIVITY FOR HEALTH. It's called COSMUR, and the words explore inspire create are emblazoned in a melange of colours - yellow, green, red, orange - on a large piece of cloth pressed tight to the scaffolding.

Down on the street, someone's taking COSMUR's exhortations to heart. Carrying them out.

By the foot of the giant scaffolding is a giant yellow garbage carrier, an ugly barrow heaped with refuse. Bottles, wrappers, half-eaten food, used toilet cleaning fluid containers, discarded clothes - all signatures of the roads walked and trails left by people in the neighbourhood. And here's someone burrowing in their trails, hungrily, eagerly, big-eyed with hope. An old man, in his sixties but older. Short, wheezy, stumping around on rocky legs. A face a few days short of a shave, lips moving to no particular tune, eyes gleaming to no particular light. Black coat spattered with dust, old white shirt open at the neck. A weatherbeaten bicycle leans against the bin, his means of escape. He's licking his lips, peering around the street with hurried breaths as he goes about his work, to make sure no one's checking on him. I, on the other hand, stare rigidly ahead, and steal glances at him whenever I think he's not looking. A strange game of street etiquette we play, he and I.

He's scrabbling around in the bin, sniffing and feeling his way through the garbage. I don't know how good his eyes are, for his hands move over the same objects two or three times. After a while, there's a stifled exclamation of triumph, and he pulls out an old, torn sweater, black and striped with red, I think but can't quite remember. He casts a quick, wheedling glance of triumph at the street, makes sure no one's looking (I turn my back, for that second. Voyeur that I am, I turn back the instant I think I can). He scuttles to his bicycle, mounts it, and totters off back Cromer Street. I turn back, and follow him slowly. The old man, his trophy slung across his hunched shoulders, sways and wheezes his way down the empty street. He passes the church. Passes its big wooden doors. Passes the statue of the crucifix by its side. And moves on. The crucifix remains where it is, locked to its prisoner with his tortured body, his upturned face, and his mangled flesh, silhouetted against the fading light. My co-observer of today's human comedy. Of the entrepreneurship of the very poor. The sign explore create inspire, COSMUR's banner, flutters and cackles in the wind that has suddenly turned fierce, crackles and spits in the day that has suddenly turned very, very cold.

Sweet Jesus, see to it that nothing happens to him on his way back. See to it that he gets home safe. That his rag keeps him warm, unhurt, and alive.

I don't know whether to laugh or cry. While winding down for the night, I came across a rediffmail article on Bush's visit to India.

While American staff must be lauded for the perfect manner in which they handle the President's security, it has petrified those who will be involved in India.

I bet it has. If the President has a cold while he's swapping rugby jokes with ministers and senior bureaucrats, will we be the next Global Terrorists, the new Threats to World Security?

Staff at the Maurya Sheraton in New Delhi, where Bush will stay, are completely overawed. They are not allowed to speak with the media and do not even whisper about the possible schedule of Bush and his wife, Laura.

'They seek him here, they seek him there....' Bush the phantom wraith slipping into and out of five-star hotels like a ghost....Bush as Clark Kent who has a Secret (who has a WMD)...watch out, you never know...he might be standing behind you. BOO! There, scared you, didn't I?

An unconfirmed report claims that American security officials wanted to handle Air Traffic Control themselves when Air Force One, the Presidential aircraft, arrives in New Delhi. Indian engineers, they've been told, are capable of handling the situation but it would not be surprising if American officials are allowed to be around.

No? Seriously? It would not be surprising? Go on, then, surprise me, do. And Jai Mata Di, while we're about it. Brave, patriotic Indian engineers, risking their all to prove the nation's collective manhood...we can handle our own Air Traffic Control ourselves, thank you very much! Huh! Who do these Americans think they are?? Remember the National Movement....jokes apart, though, it is brave, isn't it? Suppose Dubya trips on the red carpet? Jobs for the chop then, boys, surely? (It reminds me, not entirely coincidentally, of the red carpet that the Germans try to roll out for Mussolini in The Great Dictator).

Weapons, gadgets, helicopters and personnel are accompanying Tarzan as he swings from tree to tree in New Delhi. It is being said that 700 Indian and American policemen will cordon off the route from the airport to Maurya Sheraton.

Indeed. What fun. Santa Bush is coming to town...and not just Bush, but a vast, expanding mobile foliage too. With the best weapons discreet arms deals can make.

It all makes me a little sad. Visiting English cricketers used to get stomach flu when they came here, and whinged about it no end. Hell, even I got stomach flu, once in a while. Couldn't something like that be gently arranged? We are a hospitable people, it's often said, isn't it? It wouldn't end the War on The World's Biggest Abstract Noun, but it might, just might, weaken Bush's famous Resolve for a moment. Think about it....the President's Resolve has Loose Motions!

It does no harm to fantasize. Just a bit. Couldn't they cook him something spicy at the Maurya Sheraton?

Chefs of the Maurya, unite! The balance of the world hangs in your hands!

Cromer Street is a narrow road that I use to get from where I live to SOAS, or to the Senate House Library. As you walk down it towards London University, on the left there's an old church, and on the right a row of small shops - eateries, groceries, clothing shops - run chiefly by Bangladeshis. Today, as I was walking by, things seemed tense, though there weren't many people on the street. It was beginning to get dark, around the time that you remember friends telling you that King's Cross is a 'dodgy area'. Facing me, in the middle of the road, was a black man who looked absolutely livid - it took some time to realize it wasn't me he was glaring at, just staring inarticulately into space, tuning in to something I hadn't picked up yet. Two South Asian women hurried by, looking straight ahead of them, looking scared. And then I heard the voice.

'....fucking coming here with your filth. Coming to our land, with your shit and your filth.' It didn't take long to figure this out. Across the road was a man, a tramp, dressed in a thick white jacket which was probably all the clothing he'd been able to afford in all of last month, not shouting precisely but speaking in a very, very loud voice. 'I fucking wish you'd all fucking die. Go back to where you came from. I can smell you - from a mile off, you fucking filth. Coming here and destroying our land.' I walked by, darting a glance at him every two seconds despite myself. He didn't seem to notice me. I don't think he noticed anyone. There were three or four brown and black faces on the road - but to him we were a tidal wave, a plague of conquerors, a machine gun roaring away at his land, taking away his home, his happiness, his job. (Should I have shouted 'Maggie took your job, not me' at him? Trite as it might sound, it wouldn't have been untrue. But I walked by.) 'I KNOW you. ALL of you.' No, you don't. You never did and you never will. And that's not your fault. But it's not mine either. 'Go...awaaay. Fucking filth. Our land...' The voice trailed off. Speakers on Hyde Park Corner must often feel the same way, when they lose their audience. And they're often saying the same things. It was frightening, it was also pathetic. He didn't have enough strength on those bones to hurt a child. But there were children looking at him with scared, wounded eyes on the street. And I felt like them. That wasn't difficult. I wonder what it's like, though, to feel like him.

I like convalescing. Four days of bad bad flu, then I pick up the debris, start recovering, aided by Terry Pratchett's The Light Fantastic. (there are some things I'm a complete sucker for, and Pratchett's one of them. My first in ages, by the way. Last year I read about twenty one after the other when I should have been finishing a dissertation...but that's another story.)

Post-convalescence, with ginger steps, is a nicer feeling still. Today, mid-afternoon, Covent Garden. Lunch with an old college friend I hadn't met in ages. And then, out in a very fragile London sunshine, threatened by clouds from all sides but holding strong. In front of Covent Garden station, crowds milling past busily, people mostly like my friend, with work and offices to go to once lunch hour's past. The usual bunch of tourists too - many nationalities, many chattering tongues, many footsteps clattering on the cobbled stones, many cameras clacking. Many faces, disappearing into the distance.

And in the middle of all this, a bearded busker in a blue cap, picking out the most exquisite notes on an old acoustic guitar. First a typical delta blues, could have been anything really, and probably was too. Then, nearly without a break, pirouettes into the first solo guitar rendition of the Dave Brubeck Quartet's 'Take Five' that I've ever heard. A man, a woman and a pram (I wasn't near enough to see if it was occupied, but I suppose it was..) stop for a while, gaze wonderingly at him as he plays, clap their hands, and move on. He looks up briefly, grins and winks at them, then at me (who is this bugger anyway? he's been here half a bloody hour!) and carries on playing. Nearby, a youngish man in a much-worn and tattered black jacket, I think a tramp, is sitting on a bench eating the remains of a sandwich. Also listening. The liquid notes weave a blue line between us. Kids rattle across the cobbles, casting curious glances at the man with the guitar. There was something sad about it, yes. There always is about buskers, about anyone who needs to bust a gut to have someone toss 20p into his empty guitar case. When I tossed in a coin, I saw he'd made very little indeed today. But what he was doing, right then and there, was about more than that - the music was about more than that. It was sad, yes. It was also the most beautiful thing in the world.

The sun was up. For a while. Holding its own.

Why, oh why, is sleep so difficult? I spent much of the last year trying to prove that body clocks don't exist, I'm paying the price now, as reality kicks in like the worst of black coffees.

And tonight - or today - is not the best of times to go through another fit of insomnia. Tomorrow Jose Pununari, from the occupied Zanon factory in Argentina, speaks at SOAS, and I want to be there and I want to be awake. The factory takeovers by workers in Argentina have, for me, been the most exciting thing to have happened since the millennium began. Will they lead anywhere? One doesn't dare hope too much, of course, given the history of our hopes on the Left, and all our idols and movements with their tragedies and defeats and feet of clay...but yet...but yet.
Right. I thought I might have something clever/profound/witty to say. Surely there's some compensation for not being able to sleep? But it turns out I don't. I shall continue to listen to Jerry Garcia cover Dylan's music and fight the good fight against the demon of wakefulness. U. has promised to deliver a wake-up call at 8.30 in the morning...bless her, but I have a feeling it'll be to no avail. And in the meantime, anyone in London whose hearts are set a-beating at the idea of a workplace without bosses, please do turn up at SOAS tomorrow. Two in the afternoon. There - I've done my bit for the revolution. Now good night.

Martin Scorsese's monumental enterprise, the six-volume film compilation The Blues, begins with a moving elegy by Scorsese himself, a film named 'Feel Like Going Home', which traces, a la John and Alan Lomax, the beginnings of the story of the blues, back in the Mississippi delta, and makes imaginative connections between the musical past and present of the land of the blues. Midway through the film, Willie Dixon, playing in a run-down bar, breaks into a song I haven't ever heard before. Dixon turns out to be an old man with two surviving teeth - as 'classically 'typical' a purveyor of the blues as ever lived! I don't know what I expected the man who wrote 'Little Red Rooster' and 'Spoonful' to look like - I guess surprise was unavoidable. But here are lines from the song he sang - another touch of the uncanny, another song which seems to have been written for the world we live in right now, though it wasn't.

now you talk about terror
what about poor me
i been terrorized
all my days
couldn't walk down the road
without somebody gonna stop by
want to pick on poor me

'You talk about terror'. You do, indeed. And poor Willie, who's probably been singing that song decades before you decided to bomb terror out of this world, knows you've been lying all along. In a sense the only genuine 'war on terror' the USA's ever seen, or probably is ever going to see, was the Civil Rights Movement. And this song speaks the terror that was confronted, and partly beaten back, by that.

Late night, early morning really. London at its coldest. Nerves jangling to music. A DVD version of Baez singing ‘Love is just a four letter word’…and there’s the ghost of old man Dylan, rather young man, or better still boy Dylan, floating menacingly above the tragi-melody of her rendition. At a cleverly chosen juncture, a passable imitation of the great man’s voice rings through her, before she bends back into her own tones…enough said. I know you hang over this song, I know it can never be fully mine without summoning you from our past, our shared history, as you were and as you never were…but this is not a reproach, not now, let this be a shared joke between us, though I alone will laugh at it.

The DVD – Scorsese’s marvelous if somewhat hagiographic documentary – moves on to Dylan himself, barely more than a child, a rebellious adolescent with a voice and a vocabulary none had possessed yet, or has since. He sings, in front of a visibly gloomy Donovan, a haunting early version of ‘love minus zero’, in that voice, world-weary but angrily young, bitter yet joyously high-spirited, wary but knowing, hard yet tender. I haven’t heard it sung better – compassion, sweetness and brittle danger resonate with one another in that voice. In that music. We move, instantly, into that maddened Newcastle performance of ‘Like A Rolling Stone’, when a junked-out Dylan cups his hands, and blazes into the mike like lava, ‘you’re invisible, you got no secrets…to conceaaaaaal’…blotting out in that scream and in that gesture the history that gave him his power, the political world he fed off, and the doomed, failed escape from it which nonetheless succeeded, producing the greatest writing rock music will ever know. The crowd is edgy, stunned, shocked…Dylan feeds off that shock, ripping at it with his teeth, his eyes, and his breath.

And I wonder, watching all of this at a distance of four decades, about the nature of that peculiar intensity that binds me to this re-re-reproduction, through digital technology, of that moment in time and in music, about my investment in what haunts me. The nervous drive that fuses my body and mind with that moment, dimly imagined and dimly represented in the shaking motions of the camera, the machinic pulsation between us, this radiation and interlocution of distant presents and disentangling histories. How can this be named? Awe, rapture, resonance…all true, but all inadequate. Perhaps the only word that can catch it is love, at its richest and in its most ambivalent manifestations. Tenderness and desire, devotion and obsession, longing and, above all, excitement.

And it holds, though with a greater melodic softness, into the music I play next, the dancing, shimmering guitar-work of Jerry Garcia. His music moves me like the music of none I’ve heard…each note plucks out unexpected juxtapositions of sweetness, mystery, mourning and ecstasy. Garcia died horribly, but I like to think of his life as happy. The live recordings of his performances convey this to me somehow. The earlier days: the poet in a community of poets, the purveyor of lyric, the gentle, already slightly burly bearded guitarist weaving his magic with an almost diffident grace. The later days: an older, more twinkling magician, more a touch of the professional performer, perhaps, but also a more meditative wisdom at work, reflective as his earlier work was exploratory, interpretive as his earlier work was innovative. After the watershed with the Dead in the early and mid 1970s, his best work came well into his forties, from the early 1980s. There’s more mastery in the construction, the finesse that comes of re-tuning and reworking the same sets for decades. The best work comes live, there are few outstanding studio recordings in the decade before his death. Psychedelia, hippie freedom, country and bluegrass renewals…these cannot generate a new music in the 1980s, but remain Garcia’s musical referents. So he begins to re-interpret the music that swayed the Dead in the 70s. And operatic crescendos, darkly beautiful narratives are produced, and leap out from the guitar and voice at screaming audiences…there’s not just commerce, but mischief in how he plays with them. A wise ageing man, looking older than he is, a Father Christmas figure, with a big round belly and a sweet smile and a white beard…avuncular to the core. But something hides and dances beneath that, to the last days before the drug overdose that killed him. An elvish magic, to tiredly evoke tolkien, an elvish and impish and druidical magic, obvious yet hidden, dark but kind.

Nostalgia's a strange thing. How is it possible to feel nostalgic for a time and place you'd never known? But I do.

The tube, racing through central London. Leicester Square - a beggar steps on. A hard-luck story. He lost his wallet, needs some change to get back home. Perhaps an elaborate fiction, with its own codes; perhaps the truth. The horror of it - I'll never know. But fiction or truth, it doesn't matter - none of that changes the fact of his need.

Faces turned away, eyes averted. Embarrassed silences. People trying to hold on tight to the myth of normality, at the very moment that the horror of this world bursts into vision. Whatever you do, don't allow this to mean anything. It must mean nothing.

And there are also other faces. Stony, disgusted. Contemptuous eyes and wrinkled noses. They want something for nothing, the bastards. They abuse the system. Fuck them. Useless bloody cunts. And they smell too. These faces disappear, as fast as they can, behind the pages of the newspaper they happen to be holding - the Times, the Daily Mail, and yes, even the Guardian are quickly deployed to wrap their faces up in another world, protect their eyes from what is offensive and dirty and scheming and asking them for 50p. Fuck them.

That was there, on the tube. Here, in our own comfortable domestic spaces and social gathering-points, murmurs of the same: 'Real men wouldn't refuse to do a hard day's work.' 'I know them, they lie. I've seen it so many times.' 'All that is OK, but can't they wash?' Some phrases are spoken, some resonate on faces, on the way that the lips are drawn in a thin line of disgust, the eyes narrowed in loathing and, yes, fear.

And here, in the heart of a rich metropolis, a sudden sense of the uncanny, another time and place brushing against the one you inhabit now. I've been here before. The faces and the voices of the Delhi rich - the same expressions, the same tones, the same hatred for the kid on the road, tugging at your shirt, who doesn't even have the decency to be a cripple.

So much for the myth of the Three Worlds.