Philip Glass - Satyagraha

Satyagraha("insistence on truth") is a 1979 opera in three acts for orchestra, chorus and soloists, composed by Philip Glass, with a libretto by Glass and Constance DeJong.

Frida Kahlo Diego Rivera y Trotsky Video

Cinema & Me:Deepak Dobriyal

Aman Sethi: on stories about work and working

The Nights of Labor

By Jacques Rancière (1981)

1. Late one evening in Paris in October 1839, a group of men meet at the house of Martin Rose, a tailor, to start a workers' journal. Among the group is Vincard, a maker of measures, and Guany, a floor layer. Who are these men? Why are they assembling at an hour when the conscientious are senseless with sleep, and the wastrels with drink? In this pathbreaking work of labor history, philosopher Jacques Rancière sifts through the writings of tailors, hat makers, carpenters and laborers in 19th-century France to map their mental lives. In doing so, he destroys the myth of the unthinking masses praying for salvation and instead discovers working intellectuals who forged alliances with radical thinkers. The night becomes a metaphor for a different way of life to which workers can aspire, one enjoyed by those who, free from the dulling routine of the factory, can afford to stay awake and philosophize into the early hours of morning.

Working

By Studs Terkel (1974)

2. Studs Terkel's remarkable book is a series of dispatches, in the form of first-person interviews, from the American workplace of the 1970s. "Your job doesn't mean anything," Sharon Atkins, a receptionist, tells him, "You're just a little machine. A monkey could do what I do." Yet each conversation reveals individuals struggling to find meaning in a job that simultaneously defines and erodes the self. Dolores Dante, a waitress, imagines herself a ballerina swiveling between tables as she balances loaded plates on each arm; Roberta Victor teaches "Alice in Wonderland" to fifth-graders by day and works nights in a brothel to support a drug habit; Booker Page, a retired sailor, dreams of buying a schooner as he pilots his cab through Manhattan. Gradually the book acquires a hypnotic, immersive quality as the waitress speaks of prostitutes, the prostitute of housewives, and a housewife of the insecurities of not working. Terkel pencils in fragments until "Working" has an entire world between its covers.

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Chassis Workers assembling a Model T at Ford's plant in Highland Park, Mich., 1913.

Rivethead

By Ben Hamper (1991)

3. Ben Hamper's great-grandfather built motorized buggies, his paternal grandfather worked 32 years at Buick, his maternal grandfather worked 40 at Chevrolet. Uncle Jack was working at Buick, as was Uncle Clarence. When Hamper flunked out of school he tried everything, from painting houses to cleaning toilets, to stave off the moment when he walked into the GM plant where his father once fitted windshields. "Rivethead" pulls you along like a Suburban chassis on an assembly line, from 1977, when a booming auto industry couldn't make enough trucks for an America rebounding from the Arab oil shocks, right up to 1988, when plants across the country were shuttering in the face of Japanese competition. Hamper draws the reader close as he skirmishes with cokehead foremen, binges with fellow shoprats, and fires rivets into trucks late into the night, nine hours a day, six days a week, year after year. Yet the most harrowing part of the book isn't the clamor of the assembly line but the quiet, grinding drudgery of layoffs, hangovers and the endless wait for the clock to run down.

Down and Out

In Paris and London

By George Orwell (1933)

4. In 1928, George Orwell moved to the Latin Quarter in Paris, where a stroke of sudden misfortune left him almost penniless. A keen observer of the absurdities of class and power, Orwell introduced in this, his first book, many of the themes that he fleshes out in his later works. He captures vividly how a quick descent into temporary penury altered how he bought bread, smoked cigarettes, and was perceived by friends and strangers. As his friend Boris explains: "It is fatal to look hungry. It makes people want to kick you." Eventually, Orwell finds work as a plongeur, washing dishes in an expensive hotel where a double door divides the chic restaurant from the filth and chaos of the kitchens. The sections set in London, where he returned after a year and a half, are a searing indictment of the criminalization of poverty. Orwell tramps from workhouse to workhouse, thanks to city laws that keep the poor in perpetual motion: A man may stay in a given workhouse only once a month or face a week's confinement, but he also can't sleep in the open. So one either sleeps in the day and misses work or spends the night in a workhouse and spends the waking hours searching for a place to sleep.

Extreme Measures

By Martin Brookes (2004)

5. At age 4, Francis Galton could add and multiply, read English and French, and recite substantial amounts of Latin poetry. By the time of his death in 1911, he had provided future statisticians with the invaluable tools of correlation and regression, dabbled in meteorology, psychoanalysis, biology and phrenology, and, to his eternal discredit, coined the term "eugenics"—the science "of good descent"—which found its most ghastly expression in the Holocaust. In this slim biography, Martin Brookes, an evolutionary biologist at University College London, lays out Galton's eerie obsession with breeding geniuses but also describes his subject's more absurd preoccupations and inventions. Convinced that his brain was turning into "a furnace, fueled by facts," Galton invented a pair of submarine spectacles to read underwater and a "gumption reviver" that continually dripped water on his head to enable long hours of work. "Extreme Measures" is as much a brief history of European science as a tale of a man, certain of his genius, in search of an epic, defining discovery.

Source:The Wall Street Journal

A tale of Marxist and murder......

The Girl and the Autorickshaw

You Talking To Me? - Taxi Driver

The 20th century's most fascinating sisters

Unity,Diana, Jessica, Nancy, Pamela and Deborah. Or, if you prefer: a Nazi with a self-inflicted brain injury, Oswald Mosley's wife, a communist muckraker, an infamous snob/talented novelist, a muse of John Betjeman turned late-in-life lesbian and the Duchess of Devonshire.

Call the Mitford sisters what you will - and they've been accused of many things - but you could never call them boring.

Since the millennium, there's been a resurgence of interest in these famous aristocrats, from Jan Dalley's biography of Diana to the BBC adaptation of Nancy's Love in a Cold Climate and a biography of the author by family friend Harold Acton. But my interest in the family was piqued by Mary S Lovell's excellent and insightful The Mitford Girls and I've been alternately disgusted and beguiled by them ever since.

This autumn sees a further expansion of the Mitford industry, with the publication of two new books of Mitford correspondence: first, the paperback release of Decca, a doorstop-sized collection of Jessica ("Decca") Mitford's letters edited by Peter Y Sussman, which is a pretty comprehensive attempt to capture the personality of the famous author and rebel. Decca was the Mitford who made the strongest attempts to break free from her background, running away to America, joining the communist party and becoming known in the US as a writer of bold exposés, including her landmark work The American Way of Death.

Also just out is another hefty volume, Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters. Edited by Charlotte Mosley, Diana's daughter-in-law, this book collects together for the first time some of the hundreds of letters between the "girls". The youngest, and only living Mitford sister, Debo - or the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, if you prefer - has given it her seal of approval.

I'm salivating at the prospect of both books.

Not that I endorse many of the sisters' points of view, of course: Unity was such an unrepentant Nazi that she shot herself when the second world war broke out (becoming brain-damaged and incontinent, but by all counts much more placid, as a result). And Diana never apologised for the friendship with Hitler that landed her in jail. But the Mitford sisters are inherently fascinating. Nancy's books brilliantly satirise the strangeness and insularity of their upbringing (even if her sisters never quite forgave her for doing so). And having read Lovell's book plus two volumes of Nancy's correspondence, I know that Mitford letters pull no punches as alliances are established, rivalries strengthened and friendships made and broken, all via the postal service.

But it's not just the sisters' own lives that are so interesting, it's the way their lives often intersected with other important figures of the 20th century. Related to everyone from Winston Churchill to Walter Mosley, with family friends including Hitler, Evelyn Waugh and Maya Angelou, the Mitford sisters were kind of proto-Forrest Gumps, always on the edge of history and sometimes actively involved. Decca, especially, threw herself into civil rights work and Nancy and her first husband helped victims of the civil war in Spain. (Still, during the second world war, Decca wrote to Nancy that she wasn't so much worried about her family dying as of having "a v. narst time in general".)

Totally un-PC, relics of a lost era and sometimes solipsistic to an unimaginable degree? No doubt. But as chroniclers of a large family participating in many of the major political movements of the 20th century, there have never been six sisters more entertaining.

As the Mitfords themselves would say: do admit.

COURTESY:THE GUARDIAN