Ka Meghalaya and Greater Shillong Progressive Hawkers and Street Vendors Association, ka Seng jong ki nongdiemadan bad rud lynti lang bad ka TUR ka khot ka wer ia phi ki para nongdiemadan bad ki nongshong shnong ban iasnoh kti lang bad kyrshan ia ka jingiakhih bad jingiakhun jong ngi na ka bynta ban iada bad pynioh ia ki hok ban kamai ja kpoh, ban bylla sngi, ban trei ban ktah bad ban ieng ha la ki jong ki kjat.
At a recent talk show by an international television channel, the former spokesperson of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and present general secretary of the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Ram Madhav, firmly asserted that the ideology of the RSS was neither supremacist, nor dominant or aggressive. Leave alone fascist.
Tonight, 13th of December 2016, would be the 73nd night that Akhil Gogoi, the maverick 40 years old leader of Krishak Mukti Sangram Samiti (KMSS) would spend in prison. For the uninitiated – KMMS has been the largest social movement in Assam after the turn of the century – that too a left-leaning social movement. This is not the first time that Gogoi has been in prison since KMSS was launched in 2005, but what sets apart the last 72 nights compared to previous incarcerations is the blatant misuse of the criminal justice system and police by the BJP Government in Assam.
On 2nd October, Akhil Gogoi, a peasant leader and founder Secretary of Krishak Mukti Sangram Samiti (KMSS) – a left wing peasant organisation based in Assam was picked up from Gandhibasti, Guwahati and was later handed over to Jakhalabandha police in connection with a case of inciting protestors during an eviction drive against illegal settlers in and around the Kaziranga National Park (KNP). A team of Chandmari police escorted him to Nagaon and later he was sent to Lakhimpur Jail. Akhil Gogoi was remanded to 14 days judicial custody by a court at Golaghat on 2nd November. He was re-arrested in connection with a case of 2006. And He is still in Golaghat Central Jail. Akhil Gogoi wrote an open letter to in Assamese from jail. This is a translation published in The Assam News.
Capitalism doesn’t assist us in destroying itself. Should we actually become effective in building an anti-capitalist mass movement, they won’t issue us a paycheck. Instead, they will do everything possible to discredit, neutralize, imprison and kill us.
Raioteers, once a week we deserve to unwind after the crappy craziness of Indian politics and the gradual obliteration of our senses and so we thought we would introduce a Raiot Jukebox to nudge out the noise with soothing (and sometimes not so soothing) music. If you have a jukebox to share do send us your playlist.
Being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature is something I never could have imagined or seen coming.
AVNER PARIAT ON #FACEBOOK NECROPHILIA There are a multitude of reasons to discard Facebook and get back to mundane existence. I suppose this opening sentence…
“For three days, hawkers in different parts of Shillong stood with a placard where their name, items of sale and the years spent on their particular spot of business. They stood there waiting for the Government to send officials to conduct the survey and take their names for record. However, the administration sent SOT (Special Operation Team) squads instead, armed with automatic weapons and accompanied by the Police and Municipality to see to it that no hawker could do business on the footpaths”
An electric box started sparking and exploded just now near Bethany, Laitumkhrah. Caught the whole shit on camera.
Now her statues will come up all over the state, and for once I’m glad. In a few generations, all that will matter is that there is a woman’s statue as well, and that statue is not a mere kannagi who was venerated because she was a perfect wife, but of a woman who was a true and powerful leader of her own merit and her own making.
Business down by 50%. Only 3 out of 18 ATMs working.
If this is the state of things in a busy shopping area in Bengaluru, one of the biggest cities in India, and an IT hub to boot, just imagine the state of things in a rural area where most people do not have bank accounts and where internet penetration is very poor.
The worst is yet to come.
Who is a Khasi? What is Khasi language? How indigenous is Khasi religion? Who is a pure Khasi? Are Khasis hindu? Wanphrang Diengdoh’s asks some pertinent questions about Khasi history and identity.
Nobody likes to be a street-hawker forever. In fact, nobody wants to be a street-hawker to feed their children or even for themselves. Now, if the elites of Shillong can please tidy up their excessive garbage output to the Umshrypi and Wahumkhrah rivers, and bear with us so they can walk on the footpaths more comfortably, many dreams and lives can be shaped.
Africa knows it is still a white man’s world. Hence it remembers Castro’s role in Africa. So should we.
Eat Dust is no work of fiction, although one is left wondering at the bizarreness of the truth behind the loot. It is a book however that passes on timeless lore, like the story of Paikdev’s spring. As Hartman takes us over hills that once stood in Goa, to the court room, and river side, and traces his own story from Kenya to Goa, one gets a rich context for what is actually, and incredibly, unraveling in Goa.
Nicholas spent the first 14 years of his life in Mokokchung in Nagaland. It was, he says, a small little town, and he went to a small little school there. After clearing his Class 10 board exams, he moved to the relatively big city of Shillong for his junior college studies, and then his bachelor’s degree in arts, at the St Edmunds’ College.
Most people (and like in other scenarios there are exceptions) who are very good at talking in meetings perform better in meetings, than elsewhere. They have invested time in these gatherings and have honed their skills to near perfection. I today, feel silly that I once used to be in awe of them. And the other that I have been a guilty of some of these traits and need to direly cut down on attending meetings.
The street vendors/hawkers are not the problem, they are in fact the solution in many ways than one can possibly imagine.
Raioteers, once a week we deserve to unwind after the crappy craziness of Indian politics and the gradual obliteration of our senses and so we thought we would introduce a Raiot Jukebox to nudge out the noise with soothing (and sometimes not so soothing) music. If you have a jukebox to share do send us your playlist.
His enemies say he was an uncrowned king who confused unity with unanimity.
And in that his enemies are right.
If you have been following the mainstream Shillong media or reading/hearing the influential opinion-makers of the town, you would be right to think that the Hawking and Vending is an illegal activity which needs to be stamped out. But that is not the case. Illegality is a myth.
We, twenty five citizens of India, representing people’s movements, women’s organisations, trade unions, human rights organisations, youth organisations and individuals who are journalists, writers and filmmakers, from the states of Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat, Jammu & Kashmir, Karnataka, Kerala, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Manipur, Nagaland, Odisha and Tamil Nadu, visited Kashmir from 11 to 20 November 2016 with the objective of understanding first-hand, from ordinary people and civil society, the situation of the peoples of the Kashmir Valley that has emerged over the past four-and-half months since the killing of three Hizbul Mujahideen militants, Burhan Wani, Sartaj Sheikh and Pervaiz Lashkari by the Indian Army and J&K Police on 8 July 2016.
After the anti-Hindu communal attacks in Bangladesh’s Brahmonbaria in end October, social media was abuzz with it as its “breaking” news. This news competed with Bangladesh’s victory against England in a cricket match. News of such things alerts a section of West Bengal’s populace more than anywhere else beyond the People’s Republic of Bangladesh. On my Facebook page there was a discussion about the minority situation – with participants from both Bengals, both Hindus and Muslims on both sides. It was in no way representative and that’s not the story here. I just wanted to share one of the most beautiful conversations I have had in Facebook where I was confronted with such a richness of understanding and compassion, weaving in stories of the Hindu in Bangladesh to something much wider, pointing to forms of inner demons in all of us.
I was in my fourth grade in 1990, the year when Kashmir shut for 198 days, then for 207 days in 1991, 148 in 1992 and 139 in 1993, and so on. I grew up in all those tough long years. All my life I have lived here in Kashmir through the thick and thin of the situation. I grew up in curfews, crackdowns, identification parades; through the menace of the omnipresent bunkers and at the mercy of the fingers always ready on the triggers of SLRs. And throughout this time, I was educated to see, experience, understand and realise where the truth of the circumstances lay. All the young outstanding artists, doctors, engineers, lecturers, journalists and other achievers we have today have all grown up through the same troubled ’90s, the decade that saw the severest of curfews, shutdowns and crackdowns.
Northeastern women employed in Goa’s spas and salons have come out in protest against unfair labour practices and an unsafe work environment that puts them at risk of sexual assault and compromises their dignity.
The matter came to the fore when a dozen women therapists at a leading salon and spa in North Goa quit en masse on August 20 and, five days later, approached the North East Association of Goa – which represents the Northeastern community in the state and especially the 3,000-odd migrant workers from the region – for help.
ohmeghalaya.com reports on demonetization effect in Shillong SHILLONG, NOV 20: Unlike India’s first demonetization in 1978 under Prime Minister Moraji Desai, the 2016 fight against black money…
“More than black-money, demonetization appears to step one, for chasing the goals of enriching the rich and impoverishing the poor further. MODItization is already beginning to inflict terrible misery to India’s economic and social fabric. Its counter has to emerge from the very people, who have been scripted out for a terrible fate.”
It is laconic, not quite cynical, resigned yet nevertheless still searching sensibility that Nongkynrih fully realizes in Time’s Barter. Given his ability to convey multiple competing impressions within a few lines, Nongkynrih’s turn to Haiku and Senryu in the collection makes sense.
i hear
we will be in the Muslim registry
our faces will be pixelized
irises digitized,
each finger, and
the opposable thumb
that all homo-sapiens
possibly evolved together,
will be memorized
We are a country of melodrama, fantastic mythology, grandiose narratives – this is the common thread that binds us all, for better or for worse. We thrive and revel in conflating relatively minor matters into something important and meaningful, and have a disdain for things that are not dramatic, grand or aspirational, even if critically important.
Demonetisation has placed disproportionate stress on exactly those who are least likely to be source of the problems the move aims to tackle. The ones least likely to hold black money, be involved in financing terrorists or printing fake currency are the hardest hit. Being part of an entirely cash-based economy, the poor are finding the hand-to-mouth cycle abruptly broken. A few hours spent in a bank’s queue may be a minor inconvenience and a patriotic service to the nation to the relatively well-off; to the construction worker, it amounts to a meal unearned, foregone.
We support all efforts to stop corruption, stamp out black money and counterfeit currency, and act against funding that helps creates unrest in the country be it through terrorism or creating divisions and hatred among people. However, the decision to de-monetize Rs. 500 and Rs. 1000 notes is misconceived and will not address the problem of black money for the following reasons
Left-liberal “progressives” did this to themselves. This is exactly what retreating into cultural (i.e., identity) politics, while abandoning class as the basis for a socially transformative coalition, gets you.
Yesterday was the birth anniversary and the beginning of the centenary year of Gajanan Madhav Muktibodh (1917-1964), beloved Hindi poet, fiction writer and critic, who should count among the greatest of thinkers and culture personalities of modern India. His impact on Hindi literature was as transformational as that of Ghalib in Urdu or Pushkin in Russian literature. One can only remember him with great sadness and wonder what he would have thought of the situation we are in today.
Garga Chatterjee looks at what is wrong with the proposed amendments to the Citizenship Bill. BJP’s proposals are communally discriminatory and the issue of illegal migrants fleeing neighbouring nations due to human rights violations can be addressed by religion-blind, case-specific human rights abuse clauses. Anxieties around demographic changes and economic pressures are real and how this is not simply due to migrations across international borders but also migration across state borders. Expanding state government control of residency rights, property ownership, entry and settling rules is the need of the hour.
If you have been following Kashmir these days, Khurram Parvez’s name must have surely hit your screens. You may have even seen some funky graphics with FREE KHURRAM floating about.screen-shot-2016-11-09-at-11-53-10-pm But who is Khurram Parvez? Why are people in Kashmir getting all worked up about his detention? For those of us not clued into the Kashmir question, answer is, Don’t Know. So when we received STATE versus Khurram Parvez pdf from Jammu Kashmir Coalition of Civil Society – we were thrilled. So in a spirit of curiosity we offer the pdf for DOWNLOAD.
A populist wave that began with Brexit in June reached the United States in stunning fashion on Tuesday night. In one of the biggest upsets in American political history, Donald Trump won a truly historic victory in the U.S. presidential election.
9 Bhakt Wisdoms about Demonetisation
1. Do poor have 500 notes?
2. He/She was old. Could have died at home too. How can you blame demonetisation?
3. Things are difficult, but it is for the greater good of the nation.
4. Look how India is changing to digital transactions overnight…
5. Why are people not going to Govt Hospitals? They accept old notes.
6. Wait for a few months before you criticize the move.
7. Oh, how much black money did you have you anti-national, sickular, libtard, commie?
8. You can stand in queue for the tickets to 1st day 1st show of a movie but cannot for the bank?
9. Oh, so who do you want instead? Rahul aka Pappu or Kejri the Nautanki?
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