by admin | May 25, 2021 | Interviews
By Vikas Datta,
New Delhi : Celebrated in ballad and tale, love may be a casualty, rather than constituent, of marriage and family life in traditional South Asian societies. But it can still break free from its restraints to trace its own course — which can be pretty unconventional. And it is such an “other” relationship that is at the heart of this story by this Pakistani author about love seeking to challenge patriarchy-assigned gender roles.
“I think the idea of love in any culture and era was once considered bold. At one time, “Heer Ranjha” was considered a bold tale because a woman was not supposed to defy family and culture for love. Same goes for ‘Romeo and Juliet’, scores of others…,” Faiqa Mansab, who follows the tradition of “Heer..”, “Sasi Punnu” and “Sohni Mahiwal” but a bit subversively with her debut “This House of Clay and Water”, told IANS.
Its title, inspired by a fragment of verse by Shams Tabrezi — an indicative choice for those who know of this friend of famed Sufi poet Rumi — the book, published by Penguin Random House and now out in paperback, tells of two mostly privileged Lahore women and a poor hermaphrodite, whose lives intersect irreversibly after they meet at the Daata Darbar.
While Nida and Sasha follow their own choices to deal with their unhappy marital lives, outcast hermaphrodite seems more at peace but is equally torn. The outcome of this combination of fragile, star-crossed, overburdened individuals seems inevitably tragic — like the old Punjabi love epics above — but there is a twist few could have foreseen.
In an interview to IANS over email and other social media over the book’s genesis, its treatment of gender roles and perceptions, and more, Faiqa says the story came out when she “just followed the characters and their trajectory”.
“When you know your character, you know the story and where it goes. ‘This House of Clay and Water’ began with Nida, and then the hermaphrodite followed and Sasha and (her daughter) Zoya joined them and their stories intertwined and it all fell into place,” she says.
On the story taking the concept of the other — feminine, disabled, beyond male/female binary, a cleric fallen from grace and so on — Faiqa says that she thinks it is “about suppressed rage and its consequences”.
“Nida and Sasha both deal with unhappy marriages in different ways, for their husbands respond according to their respective cultural and familial values,” she holds, adding how it could have been more harmonious if the couples were matched differently.
“… But they belonged to different strata of society, and to a generation and culture that did not consider marriage to be their choice at all. Any gender role that is challenged is problematic because patriarchal structures make it so,” she says.
Faiqa also stresses how toxic masculinity is harmful in one case, while not being an alpha male in the other — especially for one of the female protagonists who “is as patriarchal as the male characters were and that’s easy to miss because she is ostensibly sexually liberated”.
With evocative descriptions of Lahore, and its complex past and present, playing a major role, Faiqa says she has a “complicated relationship” with the city, which has so “much cultural and historical richness” and “stories to tell”.
“I just cannot divorce the inner machinations of my imagination from the reality of this city. It’s a constant whisper, at times a lament, or sometimes a shout in my head, and I listen, and I try to put the sounds and smells into words and that’s somehow the background of many tales I end up telling.”
Welcoming the “largely positive” reception to her work, she says: “The best reviews from all major newspapers in India and Pakistan have been unreservedly favourable and the worst reviews, two I think, have been mixed reviews. Which, is totally understandable because this book is about suffering.”
“It’s a tragedy and therefore it isn’t for everyone. Yet, the tragic vision is not necessarily a hopeless vision, in fact, it is often a heroic vision and that is why perhaps it has been very well-received,” she says.
Faiqa, whose creative writing supervisor was British-Turkish novelist Elif Shafak of “The Forty Rules of Love: A Novel of Rumi” fame, says she working on her next novel but “doesn’t like to talk about my work when it is in the gestating stage” and just hopes to finish it soon.
She also admits it is “a very exciting time for South Asian writers, in fact for writers of diverse literature and background and I look forward to seeing more and more voices from around the world getting the chance to be published and heard”.
(Vikas Datta can be contacted at vikas.d@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Interviews
Sanjay Kumar
By Brajendra Nath Singh,
New Delhi : The National Disaster Response Force (NDRF) has inducted nine specialist teams in each of its 12 battalions after training them abroad in a bid to modernise the force and equip them in tackling chemical and nuclear disasters among other modern-era challenges.
NDRF Director General Sanjay Kumar said India is now a nuclear power, the NDRF is trained and equipped to respond to any Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear (CBRN) emergency.
“As on date all NDRF battalions are capable of dealing with CBRN emergencies. To cater to the need and to deal with chemical and nuclear disasters, we have mandated nine specialist teams for CBRN emergencies in each battalion. In addition, these teams have been trained in premier institutions in the country and abroad like UNOPCW, DRDE, Gwalior, INMAS, CME, Pune, BARC, to chisel their training and equipped with latest CBRN equipments and tools,” he said.
Kumar, an IPS officer of Himachal Pradesh cadre who has headed the NDRF for the last two-years, said that the force has taken several initiatives like awareness programmes, demonstrations and mock drill with multi-accidental hazards (MAH) units to reduce the risk of industrial disasters.
Talking about disaster handling, he said India needs to build a cohesive and structured response to stop a disaster from becoming a crisis.
He said that strengthening response is a strategy for successful Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) which can be achieved by standardisation in disaster response mechanism, proper coordination and standardization of disaster response training.
“With disasters like earthquake, floods and structure collapse occurring frequently in India, we feel that entire country needs to be trained in combating both man-made and natural disasters. There is a need to build a cohesive and structured response by the country in the face of a disaster,” Kumar said.
Disasters cannot be stopped but their turning into a crisis can be very well stopped, he added.
“This can be done by galvanising the collective capacity, which includes the civil society, the NGOs, the media and others together to make it work,” he said, pointing out that the NDRF is better prepared and equipped for any big disaster.
He said that the force has 12 battalions stationed at strategic locations across the country aided by 28 Regional Response Centres in other cities.
“The NDRF teams are self-contained in all ways and can move to the disaster site within 30 minutes of being informed of the eventuality to respond quickly. We have world class equipment and tools to respond quickly. Today, we are also well prepared in term of technology — like drones, UAVs, social media apps like Twitter, Whatsapp and Facebook for access to target areas,” he said.
The NDRF was constituted in 2006 to provide a specialised response to disasters. It has 12 battalions of 1,149 personnel each and is the prime responder in disaster of all kinds.
Each battalion has 18 specialist teams comprising of 45 personnel each. It has a professional contingent of specialists in different aspects of disaster response like hydro-metrological disaster response, collapsed structure search and rescue, emergencies arising out of use of chemical and biological weapons, rescue from deep trenches, mountain and avalanche rescue and animal disaster management etc.
“We upgrade ourselves with the state-of-the-art equipment and with specialised training to meet different kind of emerging challenges. Today, NDRF has 310 different types of equipment as per international standards for responding to various disasters. Efforts are being made to procure latest equipment to enhance our response,” he said.
Speaking about a long thought over community training programme, he said India’s high exposure to disaster risk has made it imperative to build the capacity so that the impacts of disasters can be reduced.
“The community is not only the first responder and survivor but it is the last responder as well, therefore, the loss to the life and property can be reduced drastically if the local population has been empowered and made resilient towards disasters,” he said.
Kumar, a former DGP of Himachal Pradesh, said that NDRF works to sensitize the community through its various training programm.
“We empower the community on a regular basis when we are not tackling disasters. NDRF is relentlessly engaged in the Community Capacity Building Programmes which includes training of People, SDRF, Police, Home Guards, Civil Defence Volunteers, NCC Cadets, NSS Volunteers, NGOs and other stakeholders.
“In the process of capacity building initiatives, all NDRF battalions regularly conduct awareness programs. So far NDRF has trained over 57 lakh people in its capacity building initiatives,” he said.
He said that the force’s preparedness focuses on chiselling skills and equipping oneself.
“This is called capacity-building and can be used to reduce vulnerability to disasters, mitigate their impact or respond more efficiently to them,” he said.
Sanjay Kumar, who hails from Bihar’s Kosi region known for flood disasters often, said that the state is moving towards greater disaster resilience.
“Bihar is a multi-hazard prone state. The NDRF with Bihar State Disaster Management Authority (BSDMA) has been taking various initiatives towards awareness generation and capacity building of various stakeholders and also the affected population. Emphasis has been done towards structural and non-structural strengthening of the system to reduce disaster risks and mitigate their impacts,” he said.
He said that the Bihar’s Disaster Management Department has come out with a number of schemes to improve the response mechanism and tackle the impact of natural disasters effectively.
(Brajendra Nath Singh can be contacted at brajendra.n@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Interviews, Muslim World
Hudaydah port
By Aroonim Bhuyan,
New Delhi : The Houthis, the Shia majority armed group allegedly allied to Iran, is using a key port in war-torn Yemen to import arms instead of allowing in aid material, UAE Ambassador to India Ahmed Albanna has said.
“The Houthis now are actually using the port of Hudaydah to import weapons and arms,” Albanna told IANS here.
“Also they are confiscating all the international aid — goods that are sent to Yemen to help the Yemeni people.”
The port of Hudaydah is Yemen’s main lifeline for the import of humanitarian aid.
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) is part of the Saudi-Arabia led coalition that launched a military intervention in 2015 to influence the outcome of the Yemeni civil war in favour of the internationally-recognised government of President Abdrabbuh Mansur Hadi.
The Houthis seized power in Yemen’s capital Sana’a and eastern regions of the country in 2014-15, forcing the Hadi government into exile, from where it requested armed support from its Sunni neighbour Saudi Arabia.
The ensuing civil war plunged the nation into a humanitarian crisis. According to the UN, which has limited access to Yemen, hundreds of thousands of people have fled fighting and as many as eight million people were on the brink of starvation.
Albanna said that the UAE and the Arab coalition will strongly support the work of UN Special Envoy to Yemen Martin Griffiths.
“We continue to support a political solution in Hudaydah,” he stated, describing the Houthis as a minority party that is occupying the city and port of Hudaydah
“They consist of very small percentage of the Yemeni people,” he stated. “This military occupation violates international and humanitarian law.”
According to the Ambassador, the Houthis are positioning themselves in hospitals, schools and municipal buildings and are using human shields to protect their own interests.
“So, the Arab coalition will ensure that there is a halt to those illegal activities,” he said.
“We are very much for the implementation of the UN Resolution 2216.”
Adopted in 2015, the UN Resolution calls on all parties in the embattled country, in particular the Houthis, to immediately and unconditionally end violence and refrain from further unilateral actions that threaten the political transition.
Albanna said that the Arab coalition is working to free the port of Hudaydah so that ships can unload humanitarian aid, medicines, food and other supplies for the needy people in Yemen.
“We, the Arab coalition and the United Arab Emirates, work very closely with the UN organisations, UN agencies such as the WFP (World Food Programme) and the Unicef to make sure that food, shelter, medicine reach the needy people in Yemen,” he said.
“The action that was taken by the Arab coalition in the city of Hudaydah and specifically in the port of Hudaydah I think eventually it will put the pressure on the Houthis to come back to the table of negotiations.”
Albanna said that the Arab coalition’s action will force the Houthis to work out a political solution with the legal government of Hadi that has been elected by the people of Yemen.
Stating that the Arab coalition was interested in bringing back peace in Yemen, he said: “We are interested in restoring the official government in Yemen that has been elected and has been agreed upon by all parties. So, therefore, our actions lately, particularly in the city and port of Hudaydah, eventually will sort out and somehow will ensure that the Houthis abide by international laws and rules.”
(Aroonim Bhuyan can be contacted at aroonim.b@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Interviews
UAE Ambassador to India Ahmed Albanna
By Aroonim Bhuyan,
New Delhi : Even as the US-imposed sanctions on Iran has put India’s energy security in jeopardy, UAE Ambassador to India Ahmed Albanna has allayed fears of an oil shortage, saying his country as well as Saudi Arabia can fill in if supply from Iran is disrupted.
“In the international market, the law of demand and supply controls the prices,” Albanna told IANS here in an exclusive interview when asked about rising fuel prices in India.
“Production is the important element there… to ensure that the production is enough for the world consumption of oil,” he said.
He said that consumer countries have been faced with most of the problems because of challenges faced by some Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) countries as also non-OPEC countries.
However, at the same time, he said that India need not fear shortage of oil with the new US sanctions on Iran set to take effect in November this year. Iran is the second-largest supplier of crude oil to India, supplying more than 425,000 barrels of oil per day, and India is one of the biggest foreign investors in Iran’s oil and gas industry.
“There was some disruption during the embargo against Iran years ago,” Albanna said.
“Saudi Arabia was able to rectify the matter and supply India in the face of the shortage that took place because of the embargo,” he said.
“The same thing will happen this time I guess in November, when the embargo takes place.”
The Ambassador said that because India enjoys a “great relationship” with the United Arab Emirates (UAE), Saudi Arabia and Iraq, “the alternatives are there all the time”.
Regarding energy giants Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc) and Saudi Aramco jointly investing in the development of the $44-billion Ratnagiri refinery and petrochemicals complex in Maharashtra, Albanna said that it is a “strategic project” with a trilateral arrangement.
“Due to the close and strategic relationship between the UAE and Saudi Arabia and between India and both UAE and Saudi Arabia, we have been able to reach such an agreement,” he said. “It will be beneficial to all parties.”
Earlier this year, the first consignment of two million barrels of crude oil from the UAE for India’s strategic petroleum reserve in Karnataka’s Mangaluru landed on the west coast. This consignment fills one of the two strategic reserve caverns at Mangaluru under an agreement between Adnoc and the Indian Strategic Petroleum Reserves Ltd (ISPRL).
Albanna also highlighted the close ties between India and the UAE which were elevated to that of a Comprehensive and Strategic Partnership during Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to the Gulf nation in August 2015, the first prime ministerial visit from India to that country in 34 years.
This was followed by the visit of Abu Dhabi Crown Prince and Deputy Commander of the UAE Armed Forces to India Sheikh Mohamed bin Zayed Al Nahyan in 2016 and then again in 2017 as the chief guest for India’s Republic Day celebrations. Modi again visited the UAE last year where he delivered the keynote address at the World Government Summit in Dubai.
Stating that India is one of the first countries with which the UAE has signed a strategic agreement, he said there are collaborations at many different levels.
“Whether we talk about traditional sectors like oil and gas and the normal trade and also the new sectors such as cooperation in airspace, cooperation in IT, IT manufacturing, cooperation in security and security exchange, security information exchange, and also in solar energy,” he said.
“If we look at the bilateral trade between the UAE and India, India is trading partner number one (for the UAE) with a total value of $57 billion,” Albanna said.
“If we look at the Indian side, the UAE is the third-largest trading partner after China and the US.”
Stating that all these show the importance of the India-UAE relationship, the Ambassador said that it “reflects the vision of our leadership to look at this bilateral trade and to make it further grow”.
He also referred to UAE Foreign Minister Sheikh Abdullah bin Zayed Al Nahyan’s week-long visit to India last month and said that there are many outcomes of the visit “which we are now at the stage of following up and look at the best way of implementation”.
The UAE is home to a nearly three million-strong expatriate Indian population.
(Aroonim Bhuyan can be contacted at aroonim.b@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Interviews
Writer Seema Anand
By Saket Suman,
New Delhi : She is an acknowledged authority on the Kama Sutra, and her recent book, “The Arts of Seduction”, is billed as a guide to having great sex in the 21st century. London-based mythologist and narrative practitioner Kamadevika Seema Anand laments that people are not having “great sex” these days, and that it has been reduced to an “act of instant gratification”.
“For the most part, sex is now a brief, tiresome, unfulfilling encounter, something that ‘needs to be done’. For the ancient Indians sex was a poetic experience centred on the nuances of seduction and the subtlety of exploration whereas our idea of ‘great sex’ focuses on the tiniest (and possibly the most irrelevant) part of it — the act of penetration. The ‘Kama Sutra’ holds that there is only so much one can do with the genitals. The real excitement comes from what happens before and after, from what the mind can conjure up,” Anand told IANS in an email interview.
To explain better, she asks her readers to imagine a feast of their favourite foods laid out in front of them.
“You pick up each thing separately, you savour it, you roll it around your mouth till its flavour fills your brain. Then, and only then do you move on to the next thing so that at the end of it even the memory of each taste will have the capacity to bring a smile to your face.
“Similarly, we are like a banquet of erogenous zones with an incredible capacity for pleasure, where each spot has its own sensations and its own manner of arousal — imagine the potential,” she said.
Pleasure, she said, is the bringing of each little nerve ending tingling to life — one tiny nerve at a time.
“It needs the indulgence of time and fantasy — you need to be physically, mentally and emotionally present with your lover. When was the last time you can say you did that,” she asked.
Anand reminded that “Kama Sutra” author Vatsyayan’s solution for exploring pleasure was to create variety — variety in everything.
“The only way to keep it fresh is to constantly change what we do. However, that is a challenge in itself — in our heads we can fantasise to the end of the universe and back but in terms of ‘doing’ we never vary things. So if it is the kiss then let there be 500 different types kisses to choose from, depending on the occasion — kisses that only use the lips, those that use the lips and the tongue, yet others that use the lips, the tongue and the teeth…” she quipped.
Anand said that if there was ever a time to bring back the “Kama Sutra” and its ideas, it was now.
The book, she said, began with an exploration of the incredible literary and cultural heritage which is all but lost to us. “I wanted to unravel those metaphors, to dig up the ancient myths and stories, to unsilence the narratives that made sex such a poetic experience for Ancient India. I wanted to put the seduction back into sex and reclaim the refinement and joyousness of sexual pleasure for the human race,” she said on what propelled her to write the offering.
“The Arts of Seduction” (Aleph/188 pages/ Rs 499), the publisher says, will forever change the way one thinks about love and lovemaking.
The book charts several techniques and refinements that can elevate sex to “an altogether different level” — featuring innovative codes for loves messages, the effects of applying perfume to different parts of body, the many different types of kissing, and, among others, where and how to massage your lover’s feet.
(Saket Suman can be contacted at saket.s@ians.in )
—IANS
