Chalking it up

Sunday, October 26, 2008

Not really a blog

Sunday, August 17, 2008

Last year in a brief moment between work and Swinburne, I was watching a 1970s Hindi movie starring Feroz Khan with lots of guns and car chases; the legendary Helen (Queen of the Nautch Girls) was strutting her stuff in a 1970s split sequined gown and I suddenly thought “I know this song!”

The melody was the “Ah no no noooo, don’t funk with my heaaaart” that was laid over the top of the Black-Eyed Peas’ 2006 superhit “Don’t Phunk With My Heart”. It turns out that there are two elements of that song taken from Hindi movie music hits of the 1970s.

The sleeve notes of Monkey Business, the album from which Don’t Phunk with my Heart was launched as a single, acknowledge appropriately that the tracks were “sampled” – one from 1972’s Apradh, one from 1978’s Don. The movies are not named, but the authors and performers are (one of them, Asha Bhosle, has been singing filmi hits for four decades and is still going). However, there is no actual copyright acknowledgement of the original tracks.

If we apply the rules of music sampling copyright as interpreted in Digital Sampling (1), then the original authors and performers of at least one of the works should have a copyright assignment agreement, and probably royalties, from the current artists. The article says ‘in determining whether the quality of what is taken makes it a “substantial part” of the copyright work, it is important to inquire into the importance which the taken portion bears in relation to the work as whole: is it an essential or material part of the work?’

This is not like copyright laws for reproduction of printed matter, that define photocopying as legal if under a certain percentage of the total publication, or citing with acknowledgement but without need for permission if the selection is minimal. This is about essence.

The sample from Don, a small trickle of Eastern notes at the beginning and end of DPWMH, is legitimately a sample; the similarity of melody from Apradh that originally caught my attention, however, forms the foundation of the song, only a small part of the original song, but repeated as a chorus throughout the new piece.

The entire song is strongly and deliberately referential in musical style and even in the video clip to Bollywood. I believe that the sampling was not done with any view to “stealing” or infringing copyright – but I also believe that more upfront acknowledgement of the original sources is needed.

Madonna’s sampling of the electronic riff from ABBA’s “Gimme Gimme Gimme (a Man After Midnight)” for her recent hit “Hung Up” was slightly scandalous to those of us who still remembered the original, but she handled it ethically. Bjorn Ulvaeus told the Sunday Telegraph: “Madonna wrote a very, very nice letter saying please please we have had a wonderful idea which involves Gimme Gimme. We said we would have to listen to it first but after half a minute I knew it was brilliant. That is one of the few we have allowed.” (2)

But consider this too: “…applying a more liberal approach, a substantial part will only have been reproduced where the sample takes a portion of the song which has led to its popular appeal or commercial success.” (3) Maybe this loophole was what stopped the Black Eyed Peas short of taking the copyright assignment option.

Cross-culturally, who decides popular appeal or commercial success? These songs would both have been well-known to an Indian audience but completely unknown to the target Western audience. So, plagiarizing or introducing? In a trend started way back by Malcolm McLaren of popularizing existing cultural output for financial gain, the Black Eyed Peas’ management would probably claim the latter.

(1) Fitzgerald, Brian and O'Brien, Damien (2005) Digital Sampling and Culture Jamming in a Remix World: What Does the Law Allow? http://eprints.qut.edu.au/archive/00003687/01/3687.pdf
(2) http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=5879
(3) Fitzgerald, Brian and O'Brien

And if you have time on your hands and want a giggle, why not decide for yourself?
Ae Naujawaan Hain from Apradh(Performed by Helen, vocals by Asha Bhosle)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtsY169K98E
Yeh Mera Dil from Don(Performed by Helen, vocals by Asha Bhosle)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frXcy2NOQPU
Don't Phunk with my Heart(Black Eyed Peas)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqYXh-Y4ma8&feature=related

Sunday, August 3, 2008

Holiday in Cambodia

I flew back home to Phnom Penh two days before the election. The plane was quiet and the stewardesses bored – they topped my wine up twice in a fifty minute flight from Bangkok.

I asked my cab driver on the way home if he thought there would be any problems with the election.

“Not for me,” he said, “because I don’t vote.”

He was quite comfortable talking about it. He told me that to him, not being registered was the safest option.

“The CPP know how you vote,” he said. “I don’t want to vote for them, I can’t vote against them – so I don’t vote at all. I’m happy.”

Hun Sen’s CPP, or Cambodian People’s Party, had held their power through four UN-supervised democratic elections and there was no reason to suspect that this one would be any different. In the past they had used some distinctly undemocratic tactics to ensure their ongoing popularity; gifts of rice, cloth or cash to entire village who voted CPP, plus violent bullying of constituents, kidnapping or beating of candidates, destruction of ballot papers. Nowadays, most people only entered opposition politics for the bribe they received to leave it again.

“Phnom Penh will be very quiet this weekend, you will see,” my cab driver told me. “It is a holiday all weekend. Nobody can work. They must go home to their province to vote. So the only people in town will be the young people who were born here, and the people like me who can see no point in turning up.”

I scanned through the paper to see what I had missed. Hundreds of people were reporting their names had been left off electoral lists. There had been an acid attack against an opposition candidate in the provinces, and a savage drive-by murder of a journalist who was working for Hun Sen’s main political rival Sam Rainsy. The journalist’s son, caught in the shootout outside the busy Olympic Market in Phnom Penh, was also killed. No arrests had yet been made.

International commentary on the elections acknowledged these issues but still talked cautiously of a fair and free process. In comparison to previous election violence, they reminded us, this was a “marker of progress.”

Meanwhile, Sam Rainsy was offering villagers payment to come forward and report CPP members who had offered them money for a “clean finger”[1]. His party held around one fifth of available seats, mainly around Phnom Penh. Royalist party FUNCINPEC had done little but squabble and splinter over their 26 seats won in 2003, and were expected to slip into obscurity after this election. I checked out their website – it was getting around 20 hits a day, less than my brother’s blog.

When I arrived at the office I found a walky talky and an eight page evacuation plan on my desk. “Just in case things get bad,” the HR coordinator told me.

“But they’re not likely to, though, are they?” I asked him.

He sighed, whether from relief or frustration, I could not tell. “No,” he said, “we think these elections will be very quiet.”

* * *

Democracy may symbolise rule by the people, but just like monarchy, autocracy, dictatorship, despotism, there’s still only one person at the top of the pyramid of human need. The majority decides – but what if the majority is wrong? What if the majority is stupid, or self-interested, or frightened? What if the majority changes its mind?

Cambodia has had its fair share of democracy – in fact, since independence, the country has always been ruled by the appointed leader of a ruling political party, though actual elections were few and far between for about twenty years.

It was actually one of the terms of independence in 1954, when a forum in Geneva carved out a little Switzerland for South East Asia. Communism was firmly entrenched in Moscow and Beijing, pushing through Korea and Vietnam, and nobody was sure what never-colonised Thailand was capable of. So King Sihanouk was awarded independence for his country on the basis of elections, democratic constitution and true, transparent neutrality.

Understandably, King Sihanouk was excited by the concept of democracy for his country. He promptly placed his ageing father back on the throne, dropped back to the title of Prince, and entered politics to win his first election in 1955. Democratic elections continued all the way through to 1970, and Sihanouk’s right-wing royalist Sangkum party won every time.

Khmer communism existed from the early 1960s – how could it not, given the setting, the influences, and the feudally royalist government.of the times? Phnom Penh culture was too conservative to tolerate bohemian communist ideas, and so the movement based itself in the remote hills of Ratnakiri province, where it found ready recruits in discontented minority ethnic groups who had been treated shamefully by the French and forgotten by the Sangkum era.

Marked out early for leadership in this ragged band of revolutionaries was a former school teacher turned soldier named Saloth Sar. A few years later he would take the alias Pol Pot - and redefine our global understanding of inhumanity.

In 1967, the Khmer Rouge was born on the other side of the country from Pol Pot’s hideaway, with a peasant uprising in the Thai border province of Samlot. Like many promising revolutions, it started over tax, fuelled by clear discrepancies of wealth and opportunity that were worsening under Sihanouk’s administration.

Sihanouk was in France at the time of the Samlot uprising, and the man in charge of restoring peace to the province was General Lon Nol. Though he wrote it off as a small, contained insurgency, by the time he was through an estimated 10,000 people had been killed.

By this stage, almost everyone seemed to be calling themselves either socialists or communists. Pol Pot’s mountain revolutionaries had taken the name of Kampuchea Communist Party, or KCP. The term Khmer Rouge was originally used to describe Sihanouk’s challenges from the left; on the right, another anti-Sihanouk faction was dubbed Khmer Bleu.

In 1970, while Sihanouk was out of the country again, Lon Nol took over as leader of the Sangkum Party, and therefore of Cambodia, in a successful coup backed happily by Khmer Bleu support.

This is where it gets really confusing. Despite the fact that Sihanouk was royal, and conservative, and the advocate of economic fiefdom that led to peasant insurgencies in the first place, the farmers remained loyal to him. Lon Nol represented town, money, military might and US-style anti-communism. With the help of KCP positioning, Sihanouk began to represent freedom, democracy and people power. Exiled in Beijing with no actual power at all, he made an ideal (and willing) crowbar as the communist factions began to prise their way into every province of Cambodia.

The days of neutrality were over forever. The KCP/Sihanouk in-country alliance was called Front Uni National du Kampuchéa (FUNK), while Sihanouk hastily constructed a China-backed government-in-exile known as Gouvernement Royal d'Union Nationale du Kampuchéa (GRUNK). Their in-country nemesis was Forces Armées Nationales Khmères (FANK), the conservative Khmer Bleu forces of Lon Nol now actively recruiting among Phnom Penh youth thanks to US funding. But it was a terrible time to be FANK – as well as trying to predict the military strategies of the KCP, General Lon Nol was obliged to face up to Vietnamese invasions and border skirmishes and provide troops to support US incursions on Cambodian soil.

Lon Nol was neither popular nor intelligent as a leader, especially outside the country’s capital. Using Sihanouk’s name as a promise of future stability, the KCP demanded loyalty from villages and towns as FANK retreated towards Phnom Penh. Reports of KCP atrocities worsened as the country sped towards Year Zero, 1975.

By the time the Khmer Rouge arrived in Phnom Penh there was no FUNK, GRUNK, FANK or election in sight. Now everything was simply Khmer Rouge – good and bad, well-meant and evil, freedom fighter and murderer, Sihanouk and Pol Pot – all rolled into one massive unstoppable genocidal disaster.

One of the first things the Khmer Rouge did, besides rounding up all the educated middle-class residents of Phnom Penh and head them out towards extermination, was to rename the country. Democratic Kampuchea.

* * *

So. That’s why nobody stopped Pol Pot – because the Khmer Rouge pushed out US interests, the bridges to Europe were burned, the breakdown of neutrality led to alliances between communist governments that in theory were working towards the same goals. It may have gone for much longer if the Khmer Rouge had not tried to claim Mekong Delta territory that had been Vietnamese for decades.

A full-scale invasion in the last week of 1978 saw Vietnam push back all the way to Phnom Penh. In order to defeat Khmer Rouge forces, Vietnam was suddenly faced with the responsibility of liberating and administering a country incapable of fending for itself. Their first years of occupancy were plagued by heavy fighting and casualties, a disastrous famine caused by deliberate destruction of crops, and an actual strengthening of the Khmer Rouge influence through Thai and US backing to strike a blow at Vietnam communism.

It was called a civil war, though it was Cambodian fighting Cambodian on behalf of the highest bidder. People were freed from their bound servitude on state farms or brought back from refugee camps, given guns and told what side they were on. It was at this time, and not during the time of Pol Pot, that between 4 million and 6 million landmines were sown into Cambodia’s best farming land.

The Vietnamese finally tired of this thankless occupation in 1990 and withdrew, leaving their top Cambodian ally Hun Sen in charge as prime minister. The UN reinstated a tired and sad Sihanouk as president (a few years later he would gratefully take back his pre-1954 title of King and leave politics forever). They also encouraged the country towards election in 1993, with the people voting in Sihanouk’s son Prince Norodom Ranariddh of the newly formed FUNCINPEC as their first choice.

A sore loser, Hun Sen formed an uneasy alliance with Ranariddh. Together they agreed in 1994 to outlaw the Khmer Rouge, a law that gave Hun Sen increased power as he started to jail, execute and assassinate potential rivals in the name of peace for his country.

In 1997, with the following year’s elections in their sights, FUNCINPEC began to hint that they might be prepared to recognise the Khmer Rouge. It may seem like a crazy sort of election promise, until you consider that the Khmer Rouge existed for ten years before and fifteen years after Pol Pot’s leadership, that countless soldiers who had started fighting as children, who had planted landmines and taken lives and talked of ideals to stifle their humanity, were now officially criminals, their sacrifices and causes worthless.

(Of course not all Khmer Rouge became starving disillusioned farmers making up stories about their past. Many of them, the smart ones, joined the CPP.)

The concept of revalidating the Khmer Rouge, especially those within his own ranks, was extremely threatening for Hun Sen. After a bloody and terrifying fight on the streets of Phnom Penh, he abolished the coalition and seized full power for the CPP.

By the time of the next election in 1998, several FUNCINPEC politicians and military officers had disappeared or gone into exile, and all remaining Khmer Rouge strongholds had been blown apart. There was nothing to stand in the way of CPP democracy now; Hun Sen won by a landslide.

* * *

That makes two coups that have spat in the face of Cambodia’s democratic process. Lon Nol’s 1970 coup had devastating results for Cambodia. And 1997? Actually, for many Cambodians, the events that brought Hun Sen to his current level of power are not remembered as sinister or regrettable – because since then, the country has at least been at peace.

If you include the three years he was forced to share with Prince Ranariddh, Hun Sen’s leadership has marched on uninterrupted for nearly 30 years. He is by no means a great man. Nobody describes him as lovable, or charismatic, or inspirational. His personal weaknesses are well-documented: selling government-owned land for personal profit, changing borders in Vietnam’s favour, taking a high-profile mistress who was later found murdered (though it was Hun Sen’s wife, according to the tale, who ordered the hit). His personal wealth, and that of his family members, is immense and highly suspect.

But in the leadup to this election, the attitude seems to be, learn to live with it. In fact, some political commentators have suggested that Hun Sen’s popularity is legitimately growing, as trade increases, malls open, roads are fixed and the fireworks on Victory Against Genocide Day get more impressive each year.

“He has kept our country stable,” a colleague explained to me, “and that’s a big thing for us. The last thing we want is any more fighting.”

My evacuation plan warned me to stay inside on election day, but I felt it was my democratic right to at least go out for breakfast safely on a Sunday morning. The streets were eerily deserted and all my usual haunts were closed, so I headed down to the riverside where there’s always a latte available for the right price.

The joint was jumping, crowded with tall white people wearing flak jackets which read: “Cambodia 2008: Official election observer.”

“Do you have shoooo-gar?” they were asking loudly. “Shooo-gar!”

I wondered idly if any of them would sell me their jacket, or if they liked to keep them all as souvenirs of democratic intervention – this one from Zimbabwe, that one from Afghanistan. Patting each other on the jacketed back for a job well done, under the circumstances.

“And by the way,” I imagined saying when they knocked back my offer, “if you’re all here chowing down on paninis, who’s actually observing the election?”

I don’t suppose they had a real sense of urgency with Cambodia 2008. If the results of the election were written before anybody even turned up to the polls, rushing breakfast probably seemed like an unnecessary discomfort.

When preliminary figures were released the next day, FUNCINPEC had dropped as predicted from 24 seats to 2. Sam Rainsy Party had maintained their one fifth hold. And Hun Sen’s CPP had snatched back the seats that FUNCINPEC could not keep, giving them their greatest ever majority of 92 seats from a possible 123.

Sam Rainsy is upset about it, and has called for rallies, but there’s no real passion in the public’s response. Everyone, from my cab driver to my colleagues, knows it’s unfair and undemocratic, but they’re hesitant to do anything about it.

I don’t know how long this “peace at all costs” apathy will last. Now that the economy of Cambodia is improving, the discrepancy of wealth is starting to hurt again. Ten years ago, only the foreign UN workers (and Hun Sen) had money. Now, the most ostentatious houses, the most expensive cars, belong to openly corrupt and unashamed Cambodians. The weddings, the whiskey, the Lamborghinis, seem like an immature taunt to the poor. Come and stop us… if you dare…

But then, I suppose that was the impetus behind the first peasant uprising, all those years ago, in sleepy little Samlot town. If any of those original dissidents are still alive, how their heads must spin to think of what they caused.

Yes. The elections were quiet this time around.

[1] To ensure only one vote per person is cast, each voter has their finger dipped to the knuckle in indelible ink at the polling booth. It takes a week or more to wash off.

The First Blog

Should we start with a little Hemingway?

"You know what's the trouble with you? You're an expatriate. One of the worst type. Haven't you heard that? Nobody that ever left their own country ever wrote anything worth printing. Not even in the newspapers."

He drank the coffee.

"You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You are an expatriate, see? You hang around cafes."

"Sounds like a swell life," I said.

(The Sun Also Rises, you know, the one where it's been shot off in the war to the horror of the woman who could have loved him... that bit has no correlation to my life by the way, just concentrate on the reading above.)

Friday, August 3, 2007

Rose among the horns

putting in some retrospective stuff. Here's my favourite article from this time last year, in Nepal:

The Vishnumati River has its source in the mountains near Kathmandu. It’s considered holy; in Kathmandu it merges with the Bhagmati, which then winds through the plains of Nepal to India and into the holy Ganges, where thousands of pilgrims dip daily. Sadly, as the cows bellowing forlornly on its fetid banks could testify, holy things in Nepal may be worshipped, but they’re not particularly well looked after.

The Vishnumati is considered one of the best places in town to dump waste, because the river just carries away what you no longer want. Apart from the bits that cling to rocks and banks, that grow false islands of foul rot, that litter the nearby roads and paths and wash back up the alleyways. Forty years ago you could fish in this river; now the black slick of human refuse turns your stomach.

Slaughterhouses line the Vishnumati. The blood has seeped into the soil – the locals carry handkerchiefs to cover their nose and mouth as they walk by. On the ground lie freshly peeled skins, casually crumpled as if the buffalo has just stepped out of them into the shower. Murders of crows descend on sacks of bloody bones. Aged and bandy-legged porters pack baskets of buffalo dung and offal onto their heads, wade into the viscous waters and dump their offensive load – up there for one of the worst jobs in the world.

Yet in the midst of this carnage, potplants bloom. Women dress up for temple visits, old men hold hands together on doorsteps, children play happily with buff knuckles until their mothers scold them on hygiene principles. This community is trying to make the most of their stinky situation.

We enter Radhika’s house through an 18th century four foot wooden door. The multi-storied house is surprisingly shallow, only around 3 metres deep before it falls away into a small paved terrace, then to swampland rampant with pumpkin vines. It is not her land, nor her house, and she tells me that the landlord, who lives upstairs, counts each pumpkin.

“But I like living here,” she assures me, grinning. “It’s not where I was born, but my children have never known anywhere else. The place may be dirty but the people are good.”

Radhika’s terrace is crowded with pots containing tomatoes, capsicum and eggplant, their roots cheekily sucking on the swamp below. It’s called “zero land farming.”

“My daughter loves these plants,” she says fondly. “She was given the seedlings at school, and she looks after them every day. I never thought our family could grow our own food without land, but she’s taught me how.”

Like most people in this community, Radhika is poor and uneducated. Her children’s is the first generation around here to have a school to go to, and still very few houses have their own toilet.

“We are lucky,” she confides. “We are allowed to use the toilet in the house next door. But my children used to just go in the gutter, and even now you see other children doing that. It’s not nice.”

Though Radhika still throws her rubbish into the river in a plastic bag, there is less and less of it. She separates any bottles or tin for the scrap collectors to recycle. She carefully saves the vegetable scraps each time she cooks, for her neighbour Sunita who has a composter on her rooftop. In exchange for the scraps she regularly receives bags full of rich healthy soil to make her tiny farm thrive.

We visit Sunita’s rooftop garden, way above the odour, with a view to Kathmandu’s iconic Swayambu temple and the hills beyond. Sunita is a passionate gardener, a tender smile on her old-before-her-time face as she shows us her vegetables and cheery blooms - marigolds, lilies and a surprising red fuchsia bush. She wears a sari when she gardens, though she tells me “it’s an old one.”

Sunita’s grandfather hovers among the pots, a fine figure with his shorts, cane and oval Nepali cap to keep the sun from burning his skinny balding skull. This house was where he was born, though the family have never owned it. It’s unlikely they ever will.

He’s keen to chat with his impromptu visitors. He is the one who tells us about the long-gone days of fishing in the Vishnumati, plus the holy and convenient necessity for every Hindu in town to scatter their beloved’s ashes into the Ganges-bound Baghmati. Symbolic though it may be, this final journey is a muddy, messy and slowmoving affair and it’s arguable whether any ashes actually make it all the way to India.

My colleague Pradeep nods sadly. He remembers picnics on the banks of this river when he was a child. But that was before roads were built and legends were told of opportunities in Kathmandu, leading to unprecedented migration from villages into a city ill-prepared for its new inhabitants. Refuse, garbage, faeces, hooves and horns first fed, then choked the river’s flow as the population rose from 300,000 to nearly 2 million in 40 years.

“I’m waiting for the next earthquake,” says Pradeep only half-jokingly. “That should get rid of a few of us.”

We stroll along the riverside, namaste to the children in their school playground, gag a little as the wind wafts another polluted stench our way. Near the bridge, there is a breath of fresh air – a garden, planted and tended by a community cooperative, bursting with colour. Here there are no vegetables at all – it’s designed as a pleasure garden, with shady trees, a shrine to Krishna and, of all things, heavy sweet rosebushes.

“We worked hard to make this happen, mostly with our own money,” says Kanchar, the cooperative’s treasurer. “At first we fenced off the area and planted some grass but people still broke through – they used our new garden to shoot up drugs or go to the toilet. Then we put in the trees and the shrine. The flowers began to bloom. Now we cut and sell the flowers and use the money to pay for new plants.”

After nearly two years of work, the oasis stretches for around 200 metres along the riverbank before it disintegrates into grey and stinking normality. Upstream 500 metres, another group has now started on a similar venture in healthy neighbourhood rivalry.

“What I like the most,” says Kanchar, “is that people don’t hold their noses here by our houses. That makes me proud.”

I ask Kanchar what they’re doing about the river itself. How are they protecting it from the dumping that goes on? Does he think there will ever be fish in it again?

He looks at me like I’m mad, breaks it to me as gently as he can.

“The river’s dead,” he tells me. “We’re doing many good things here, but nothing we can do now will change that.”