THE GLOBAL AND THE LOCAL

TORTURED BY TERRORISM The fear of terrorism is being mobilized to do a lot of things - sell arms, sell Hollywood movies, sell a lot of extravagantly wasteful wars. Covertly, it is also being mobilized to destroy ethical principles that make up the foundation of democratic societies. This was none more evident than last Friday, when a panel on torture after 9/11 was held at the City University of New York in NYC. Should torture, as an interrogation technique, become legal in extreme exceptions like terrorism in democratic societies? The fact that this question was even raised at all makes clear that that the fear of terrorist attacks is a significant factor that is changing the norms of ethical behavior. And it is a fear that is also cleverly being taken advantage of by individuals and organizations to push forward their own authoritarian agendas. Alan Dershowitz, Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law at Harvard University, strongly advocated for torture warrants to government of...

Indigenous Women Challenging the Global Agenda by Maya Dollarhide, Sushma Joshi, 10/26/03

OCT 23 - I was listening to a radio report on whether the terrorist sleeper cell that was busted in Buffalo was really a sleeper cell, when somebody’s voice came on air. The voice was breathy and stern, clearly belonging to a tough guy. “One by one, the terrorists are learning the meaning of American justice,” the voice said, making sure to pause between One-By-One to give it the proper dramatic effect. Echoes of cowboys galloping through the prairie, police cars chasing the bad guys, commandos sliding down walls in fast pursuit of deadly danger came to mind. I got chills up my spine. I wanted to run to the mall and stand in line to see this latest action movie. “That was President Bush on air. This is NPR,” said the bland voice of the announcer. “President Bush is planning to meet with Governor Arnold Swarznegger in California.” “I am going to share with him the optimism with him about this country,” the Hollywood action voice returned. I mentally added the crescendo that should be...

ANTI-WAR MOVEMENT BUILDS SUSHMA JOSHI, The Kathmandu Post, October 17, 2003 A strong and vocal opposition to the war against Iraq is growing the United States. As President George Bush requests another 87 billion to continue the occupation, thousands of people, fed up with the stagnant economy, the fiscal deficit as well as recent stories about US soldier suicides in Iraq, are mobilizing to bring the war to an end. On Tuesday October 14th, St. John's Cathedral on the Upper West Side of New York was packed as a sizable crowd came to listen to Amy Goodman, a journalist and activist of Democracy Now!, and Tariq Ali, a well-known activist and broadcaster. "Lies take lives. We understand that clearly by looking at Iraq," said Amy Goodman. She talked about Joseph Wilson, former US Ambassador to Gabon who had made a trip to Niger to investigate if Iraq had covertly purchased uranium from that government. His report, which concluded this was not possible, was ignored and...

MORE THAN SKIN-DEEP: AN UPDATE ON THE BEAUTY INDUSTRY Also published at: http://www.nrn.org.np/medianewsdetail.php?id=77 Millions of women in New York City get their hair and nails done every day. Rushing through hectic schedules, they rarely have time to notice the women bending over the manicures. Increasingly, a large number of these beauty workers originate from Nepal. "There are an estimated 20,000 Nepali immigrants living in New York City," says Anand Bist, of the Queens based Nepalese Democratic Youth Council. Almost half of them are women. Due to the high demand for childcare, many Nepali women work as baby-sitters and domestic help in wealthier households in Manhattan and New Jersey. The remaining bulk of Nepali women work in the beauty industry. Mingma Sherpa, 26, works in a pedicure business in the Upper East Side. "I work 6 days a week, for ten hours a day," she says. She gets paid $75 a day, along with tips, which add up to $280 a week. She attended a p...

Sarina Rai - Rai Ko Ris ------------------------------------------------------------------------ An interview by Sushma Joshi Why Rai Ko Ris? The band you mean? Because it's a typical thing we say out here and I am a Rai-nee so it was partly a good Nepali name and partly a good joke. Nothing to do with how great Rais are or anything. All people will behave the same...i.e. what benefits them. You can't say you're different coz you're this or that ethnicity in the end. What were the three things that turned you into this punk-rocking guerilla artist? I don't know about artist...I’d say more music-person. I think guerilla is spelt “guerrilla”. I was always surrounded by cousin brothers who played geeetar and I was not satisfied just being an on-looker. I wanted to rock out too. And I was always screaming and shouting my own songs since I was tiny- the squash racquet (guitar) and hairbrush (microphone) act. I loved loud, fast, rock music. At 17 I had a...

THE NECESSITY OF IMAGINATION SUSHMA JOSHI Middle class people from Kathmandu, well versed in critique, seem to agree on one basic issue: the level of discourse in Nepal, from literature to the arts, from social sciences to journalism, has been shimmering gently at the same level of mediocrity for about the last two hundred years. Newspapers bore us with their editorials on pollution. The INGO and NGO reports bore us with their bland litanies on gender and poverty, hashed out year after year by the same class of Western educated all-but-disseration clones. Funny rants in hip papers of the Kathmandu elite bore us because they sound alarmingly similar to the rest of the whining about Nepal as a broken-down, hopeless basketcase. The arts bore us, with top notch artists of Nepal churning out abstract or expressionist or impressionist products, but missing the conceptual handle of ideas, the intertextual dialogue with knowledge that has been crucial to post-modern art movements globall...