Breaking News – Page 387

Breaking News·Kashmir·Recent News·Top Stories

2 Staffers, 6 Students Test Positive for COVID at ITI Tral

April 7, 2021

Srinagar, Apr 7: (GNS) Two staffers besides six students of an ITI centre have tested positive for novel Coronavirus on the conduct of Rapid

Fern (Frances McDormand) has a cold hard face. It can withstand all: low pay, harsh winds, long hours. She changes towns every few weeks with a practiced ease. A new workplace, new colleagues, new companions – but the same old home. Fern, a gig worker, carries her world wherever she travels: she lives out of a Recreational Vehicle, a mobile home that moves on wheels. But, as she would explain, she’s not homeless but “houseless”. People offer help but she declines. These choices emphasise personal dignity but also obstinance and isolation – a wilful rejection of societal norms. Her literal journeys are an extension of a figurative one, running from heart to mind, from grief to acceptance. Home, in Chloé Zhao’s Nomadland, is a season that has passed, leaving behind memories and souvenirs. The movie opens to Fern loading her RV with personal belongings. She holds some items – a dinner plate, an old pair of jeans – for a few seconds longer, as if lost in an elaborate trance or a silent conversation. Moments like these highlight the film’s primary curiosity: probing the very essence of homelessness – and the futility of purported choice in such an exercise. Fern ‘decided’ to be homeless after her husband died and the only manufacturing plant in her hometown, Empire, Nevada, closed. She had no children, so she moved – and kept moving. But is ‘leaving’ the home same as being evicted from it by grief? Is a choice made under compulsion, a choice at all? Podcast | Bombay Begums Is About the Real Problems of Real Women: Pooja Bhatt She meets other nomads on the way, as the movie starts to open. Her friend and colleague, Linda May, tells her that in 2008, after the Great Recession, she wanted to kill herself. Linda had been working since the age of 12, but even after five decades, she just had $550 in her social security. She chose to live, finding value in things untainted by money: her dogs and self-respect. Linda invites Fern to a desert rendezvous in Arizona, organised by Bob Welles, a legendary vandweller and a popular YouTuber, whose annual gatherings have come to define the American nomadic culture. Fern meets a 75-year-old woman, Swankie, at the campsite who, diagnosed with cancer, has decided to live her last few months on her own terms. Death is a constant presence in Nomadland. It has shaped Fern, Linda and Swankie’s lives. Even Bob took to an RV due to the death of his son. But the drama is also marked by a different kind of (unacknowledged) death: the death of the American middle-class – the death of the American dream. The RV culture among the older Americans, especially after the Great Recession, is a reflection of its devastating aftermath. Fern, even after numerous part-time jobs, desperately needs a gig. Taking an early retirement is not an option; she can’t “get on by benefits”. She works such long hours – at an Amazon warehouse, for example – that sitting on a chair in a store lulls her to sleep. When she can’t afford the van repairs, she visits her sister to borrow some money. Even the ‘choice’ of leaving Empire was, in part, motivated by the lack of earning opportunity. Nomadland is informed by an intriguing conical structure, where the increasing breadth of Fern’s life runs parallel to despair accommodating hope and, at times literally, light dispelling the dark. The film opens to a cold blue palette: overcast skies, heaving winds, frigid air – and a frequent snowfall that feels like divine punishment. The sunlight enters the frame for the first time at Bob’s campsite, where Fern is spending time with the people of her tribe. As she befriends more nomads, the frames get warmer. She drops frequent smiles, as her face turns soft like a girl, showing glimpses of a long-gone life. This is a smart structural choice because, much like most negotiations with grief, it feels ironic on the surface: the only way to squash sorrow is to embrace it. Even years after her husband’s death though, Fern continues to struggle. Leaving home and hitting the road resulted in a different life – a change implemented to bury her grief. But she only managed to change zip codes. Her RV became a literal storehouse of her husband’s memories: his clothes, his souvenirs, his pictures. It became her coping mechanism – an unlikely offshoot of her PTSD. Zhao tackles heavy themes with impressive clarity, never reducing Fern to her wretched circumstances. But some of her scenes become pathos-ridden informational heaps, underlining the central thesis. At the start of the film, Fern’s colleague, working at Amazon, (quite abruptly) talks about her relationship with the band The Smiths, whose lyrics she’s tattooed: “Home, is it just a word? Or is it something that you carry within you”? Near the climax, Fern explains her decision to be rootless – a nugget of information that needed a lighter hand. Even Fern listening to Swankie’s last wish feels like an obvious bit of foreshadowing. A later scene, as expected, does honour her want, turning a sobering moment into a filmmaking cliché. But McDormand produces a masterful example of economic acting, wearing Fern’s minimalism on her face: most times, all she has is a nod, a smile, few lines. Also read: Arivu’s ‘Enjoy Enjaami’ Is a Journey in Discovering Roots and Celebrating Equality This drama, much like its characters, is also suspended between homes. But unlike them, Nomadland is (largely) unaware. That is so because the film is marked by curious contradictions: between fiction and nonfiction, the personal and the political, the individual and the collective. Almost every destabilising factor in the nomads’ lives – low paying gigs, demanding hours, shrinking safety nets – didn’t just happen overnight, or even after the Great Recession. It’s part of a five-decade long onslaught, where capital has destroyed labour via union busting, regressive taxation, stagnant pays, reducing people to machines. But Zhao doesn’t care for this part of the story, contradicting the journalistic and political preoccupations of its source material, the 2017 narrative nonfiction book Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century. “Many of the people I met felt that they had spent too long losing a rigged game,” writes author Jessica Bruder in the initial pages of the book. “And so, they found a way to hack the system” – “breaking the shackles of rents and mortgages” in lieu of a nomadic lifestyle. But the ‘rigged system’ is more or less absent in the film. Besides Linda talking about her economic crisis and Bob mentioning the “tyranny of the marketplace”, Nomadland’s narrative framing makes it a story of unresolved grief, reducing a national sorrow to an individual despair. (It’s all the more disappointing because Linda and Bob, characters in the book, are playing themselves in the movie.) Fern, according to Zhao, just happens to be in this situation. Had her husband not died, implies the movie, she probably would not have been in an RV. Does this elision make Nomadland mediocre? No. But it does make the film incomplete and indifferent – and that distinction is crucial. Making the structural personal is in fact a preferred trick of the status quo – and the eternal myth of American capitalism. Zhao didn’t even need to dig deep: just a few scenes would have broadened the big picture, as shown in Ken Loach’s Sorry We Missed You and Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite. In the last year’s Best-Picture Oscar winner, for instance, a few lines of dialogue depict the economic insecurity of the South Korean middle-class. (That scene is so sharp and understated that you may have missed it.) Ditto Loach’s searing domestic drama, where the familial and the political was so closely tied that the movie told multiple stories at once, illuminating the cause-and-effect relationship between them. Nomadland, on the contrary, almost exists on two parallel planes. It opens its heart for the personal but closes its mind for the political.

Breaking News·International·Recent News·Top Stories

Movie Review: ‘Nomadland’ Reduces a National Sorrow to an Individual Despair

April 7, 2021

Nidae Kashmir

Fern (Frances McDormand) has a cold hard face. It can withstand all: low pay, harsh winds, long hours. She changes towns every few weeks

Breaking News·International·Recent News

Minor boy handed over to PaK authorities after inadvertently crossing the border

April 7, 2021

Nidae Kashmir

Kupwara, Apr 7: A 13-year-old boy was handed over to Pakistani authorities after he inadvertently crossed the border between the two countries and entered

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday signed legislation that could theoretically mean he stays in power till 2036, according to a copy of the bill posted on the government’s legal information portal. Under the previous constitution, Putin, 68, who has already been in power for more than two decades, would have been required to have stepped down after his second consecutive term ends in 2024. But amendments approved by Russians in a nationwide vote last year allow him to run for two more six-year presidential terms. The amendments were passed by the State Duma in late March. More than 20 years at the helm Putin, who will be 83 in 2036, already served two consecutive terms as president from 2000 till 2008, when he had to step down according to the rules of the previous 1993 constitution. He then served two terms as prime minister — with many observers saying he was still president in all but name — before being reelected to the presidential post in 2012 and 2018. The amendments represent a major overhaul of the constitution, and opposition forces have accused Putin of abuse of power in introducing them. If Putin is reelected twice and serves to the end of the second term, he will beat Josef Stalin to become the longest-serving leader of Russia since Peter the Great, who was in power for 42 years.

Breaking News·International·Recent News

Russia: Vladimir Putin Signs Law allowing Him to Rule Till 2036

April 7, 2021

Nidae Kashmir

Russian President Vladimir Putin on Monday signed legislation that could theoretically mean he stays in power till 2036, according to a copy of the

Hooghly: In the 2021 West Bengal assembly elections, several parties have fielded film personalities as candidates. But one candidate shines brighter than all the rest. Manoranjan Byapari, the 70-year-old Trinamool Congress (TMC) candidate from Balagarh in West Bengal’s Hooghly district, has nothing to do with the world of glamour and glitz. He has no swanky cars. He doesn’t wear designer clothes. He doesn’t own even a piece of land. He never went to school. He spent nights in jail. He pulled rickshaws, worked in a tea stall, cooked food for school children and even worked in a crematorium, all to make a living. Yet he is the biggest star in this election. Byapari is a former refugee from East Bengal (now Bangladesh), who lives in the fringes of South Kolkata in a small suburb called Khudirabad. His home is a single-storey brick house with an asbestos ceiling. Since March 8, however, Byapari and his wife have been living in a worn out house in a town called Mogra in the Hooghly district because of the elections. As I knocked on the door at 6:35 in the morning, Byapari peeped from the netted window and came running to open the door, wearing a khadi kurta and loose white pajama with a gamchha (a traditional thin, cotton towel) around his neck. “All my life I was a vagabond. I have nothing except her,” said Byapari as he looks back to his wife. Also read: Bengal: How the Sangh Parivar Created a Hindutva Wave in East Midnapore District ‘We must resist’ On the afternoon of February 28, six days before the TMC announced its candidates for the assembly election, Byapari received a call from West Bengal’s chief minister, Mamata Banerjee. “Manoranjan da, you will have to contest this election,” Didi (Banerjee) told Byapari. “When someone as important as our chief minister, who I believe is the most important politician in the country, requests something, there is only one answer,” Byapari told me. Manoranjan Byapari campaigning for the West Bengal state assembly elections. Photo: Himadri Ghosh In normal circumstances, he never would have joined politics, he said. “The system is rotten,” he explained. But now, when a bohiragoto (outsider) force threatens Bengal’s language, culture, tradition and legacy, he had no option. “My conscience said I should stand up to these divisive forces,” said Byapari. “Every right-minded Bengali should stand against it. This election is not a regular election. With this election, they want to dokhol (take control of) Bengal. So we must resist.” On the surface, Byapari’s life makes a fascinating story. It is the life of a real working-class hero. But when you dig deeper, you find only deprivation, ruthlessness, neglect, rejection, poverty, despair, hunger and nothingness. In the 1970s, at the height of the Naxal movement in Bengal, Byapari spent about 26 months in jail. His father had been a coolie and had died early due to an ulcer. For years, he slept on the platform of Jadavpur railway station. As a Dalit (commonly referred to in Bengal as namashudra and refugee), he was a nobody in the vast ‘cosmopolitan’ city of Calcutta as it was then called. Byapari said that he went to jail several times. It was one way to earn a living. Sometimes some railway platform police (RPF) needed to fulfil their monthly quota. “Chullu sellers used to have set up with the police. Police would inform them that they will raid on such and such date on such and such time. The seller used to find people like us to give us Rs 5 to spend 5-6 days in jail,” said Byapari as he tucked in a wad of tobacco in his lower lip. Then he was jailed for a longer time during the Naxal movement, charged with Indian Penal Code sections 148 (rioting with deadly weapons), 149 (unlawful assembly) and 307 (attempt to murder). “This jail term has changed everything. It was in jail that I learned how to read and write,” he said. Also read: ‘Mind Game’: How a Perception War Is Dominating the Bengal Election Campaign After he was released from jail, Byapari started pulling a rickshaw. One sweltering afternoon, when Byapari waited for a passenger outside Jyotish Roy College in Jadavpur, a lady professor hired his rickshaw. For days, Byapari had been searching for the precise meaning of a certain word, so he asked the professor the meaning of jijibisha. The professor turned out to be the eminent writer and social activist Mahasweta Devi. It was because of Devi that Byapari started writing. His first ever piece was published in Devi’s journal, Bartika. “If Mahasweta Devi were alive, she would have been extremely happy to see me contest an election,” said Byapari, wiping the sweat off his brow with his gamchha. “I am fortunate that some exceptionally nice people came to my life, such as Mahasweta Devi; such as the person who taught me how to read and write in jail.” No ordinary election Frequently interrupted by phone calls and local party leaders, Byapari and I chatted about God. “No offence to anyone, but God never helped me. Mortals did,” said Byapari. “People with blood and mass gave me food to eat and showered me with love. The kind of love and affection I get here every single day is unimaginable. People from the Communist Party of India (Marxist), some even from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), come to meet me. Many of them tell me that they are with me no matter what.” At first, however, Byapari’s candidature was not well received: some people tried to paint him as a bohiragata in Balagarh. “I am a refugee,” he told those people. “So I am bohiragata anywhere in this country. But I am one of you in a way nobody else can be. I lived a feral life. I understand the pain of a rag picker, a rickshaw puller, a tea seller, a person who sleeps on the street, because for years I was doing all this.” Manoranjan Byapari campaigning for the West Bengal state assembly elections. Photo: Himadri Ghosh In any case, Byapari plans to build his first ever home in Balagarh and stay there for the rest of his life. Once he began campaigning and said he’d like to remain in his constituency, people offered to donate land to him to build his house. “I said I don’t need land. But I need half a brick from every house in Balagarh constituency. After the election, I will start collecting bricks and build my house,” he said. Since he shifted to Mogra, Byapari has been campaigning relentlessly. He starts at about nine in the morning and returns home only after 11 pm. His lunch and the hour’s rest he needs in the heat of the afternoon are always at some party worker’s house. For 21 years, Byapari had worked as a cook, making food for over 150 children every day. With this in mind, the local TMC leadership organised a public interaction event in the Somra gram panchayat (village council), where Byapari cooked and interacted with women from various self-help groups. In his campaign speeches, he attacks the BJP, calling them an extremely powerful, violent and anti-people party on a mission to grab Bengal. “This party is all set to replace the Indian constitution with Manusmṛiti, where Dalits and Muslims will be treated as slaves,” Byapari explained to me. “Their vision is to build a society on the principle of Brahmanbad. They are a divisive force, tearing down our society on religious and caste lines.” Also read: Ground Report: The RSS Took Root in Bengal One Haripad at a Time He said it is “criminal” to divert attention from people’s issues such as the near daily increase in prices of petrol and diesel, the hikes in gas prices, the high prices of essential food items, safety for women and jobs for the youth and make the election about the Hindu-Muslim divide. “The BJP got a lath (kick) in Punjab, in Haryana. That’s what they deserve. The people of Bengal will give them another lath on May 2,” he said. What of the overwhelming support for the BJP from the other backward classes, the scheduled caste and the scheduled tribes communities, I asked. “Namashudras mostly came from Bangladesh. They have a hidden angst against Muslims,” said Byapari. “The BJP is fanning the Dalit angst against Muslims. They are telling them they will throw Muslims out of this country and give their land to Dalits and Adivasis. This is how they manipulate these people.” Why Trinamool, I asked. Aren’t you anti-establishment? “Yes I am. And I will remain so,” Byapari said. “When the TMC came to power in 2011, I had no expectations from the party. But they have worked for the poor. This government’s welfare schemes have reached many people. Poor, underprivileged Dalits benefitted from this government. Also, we are living in extraordinary times and this is no simple election. This election is to save Bengal, save Bengal’s soul.” He strongly believes that as chief minister, Banerjee should crack down on corrupt leaders and eliminate lumpen elements from the party. Manoranjan Byapari. Photo: Himadri Ghosh The people’s writer On our return to Byapari’s home, we discussed his plans for his constituency if he were to win the seat. As he took his medicines and breakfasted on panta bhat (leftover rice soaked in water overnight, traditionally served in the morning with salt, onion, chili), he said, “I have written a book on them (marginalised people). Now I want to work for them. I plan to open a nagorik (citizen’s) committee in various locations in my constituency. That committee will include people like rickshaw pullers, fish sellers, vegetable sellers and group D staff. People across all socio-economic backgrounds, from all castes and religions will be part of it. We will listen to their demands and solve their problems. I will ensure all that government schemes reach the people without hindrance.” Also read: Despite Amphan Misgovernance, TMC Likely to Retain South 24 Parganas Byapari has written 23 books and won an award from the Paschimbanga Bangla Akademi. The translation of his autobiography, Interrogating My Chandal Life, won the Hindu literary prize in 2018 in the non-fiction category. Last September, Mamata Banerjee announced the formation of the first of its kind Dalit Sahitya Academy in Bengal, with Byapari as its chairperson. He goes from one litfest to the other and lectures in colleges and universities. But in all these years, he has remained unchanged, living a modest life in a modest rented home. As I left his house, I saw a large gathering of TMC workers waiting for Byapari. He came out ten minutes later and hopped on a rickshaw decorated with party flags. As the rickshaw rolled down the street, the TMC workers chanted, “Rickshaw ebar Bidhan Sabha-e (This time the rickshaw will reach the Vidhan Sabha).”

Breaking News·National·Recent News

Author Manoranjan Byapari Is on a Mission to ‘Save Bengal’s Soul’

April 7, 2021

Nidae Kashmir

Hooghly: In the 2021 West Bengal assembly elections, several parties have fielded film personalities as candidates. But one candidate shines brighter than all the rest.