My earliest reading memory When I was a child, my father, a young and poor novelist, kept our unfurnished house packed with books. A deluge spilled out from the shelves, covering the floor in disorderly towers like a secondhand bookstore where the organising had been put off for ever. To me, books were half-living beings that constantly multiplied and expanded their boundaries. Despite the frequent moves, I could feel at ease thanks to all those books protecting me. Before I made friends in a strange neighbourhood, I had my books with me every afternoon.
My favourite book growing up What I read in my early childhood were children’s books by Korean writers such as Kang So-cheon or Ma Hae-song. I remember being mesmerised by the story of a photo studio that printed pictures of people’s dreams. And the image of a child feeling sorry for the trees sleeping standing up at night and singing: “Oh tree, oh tree, lie down and sleep.” A particularly unforgettable translated children’s book is The Brothers Lionheart by Astrid Lindgren.
In my late teens I was absorbed in reading Russian literature, especially the long, tenacious novels by Dostoevsky. Death of a Poet by Pasternak was also a favourite I’d read multiple times.
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The book that changed me as a teenager At the age of 14, I read Sapyong Station, a short story by Lim Chul-woo. It depicts a rural train station in the dead of a snowy night, and there’s no protagonist; the inner monologues of passengers waiting for the last train combine like a medley. One coughs while another tries to strike up a conversation, and someone else throws sawdust into the stove and looks into the flames. I was enthralled by this lively story and decided to become a writer.
The writer who changed my mind About 10 years ago, I read WG Sebald’s Austerlitz and came to dwell on the way he penetrated deeply into the inner world to embrace collective memories. Since then, I have read most of his books; The Emigrants is the one I cherish.
The author I came back to There was a year when I could neither write nor read fiction. I could only watch documentaries because fiction films were unbearable. I spent my time reading mostly astrophysics books. But somehow Jorge Luis Borges was an exception. I revisited and savoured the volumes by him that I’d flipped through in my 20s, such as The Book of Sand and Shakespeare’s Memory.
The books I discovered later in life The Periodic Table by Primo Levi. Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino. Dubliners by James Joyce. The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy. Nox by Anne Carson.
The books I am currently reading Dictee by Theresa Hak Kyung Cha and The End of Days by Jenny Erpenbeck.
My comfort read Most books I read before bed are about plants, such as Jane Goodall’s Seeds of Hope or Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees. The book I turn to when I need silence is Glenn Gould Piano Solo by Michel Schneider.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
The cracks on the walls started to appear two days earlier. But despite the warning signs, Moushumi Begum still came to work on 24 April 2013. Moments later, she was buried under heavy rubble. “It all happened so quickly. I vividly remember every detail about that day, even though it was 10 years ago,” says Begum, who spent three hours trapped under Rana Plaza, the eight-storey building on the outskirts of Dhaka, Bangladesh, that came crashing down.
That morning, garment workers and some factory managers had argued in the dusty courtyard outside the building, many reluctant to enter as they feared it was unsafe. Workers had been evacuated the day before because of those fears. Some say they were told they would not be paid that month’s wages if they did not go to work; others say that an internal gate was closed behind them.
In the 90 seconds it took to collapse, Rana Plaza became a symbol of global inequality. The final death toll was 1,134 people, with 2,500 injured. There were harrowing stories of survival, of people having their limbs amputated without anaesthetic to prise them from the rubble.
A new report by ActionAid Bangladesh has shed light on the devastating toll the disaster has taken on survivors a decade on, revealing that more than half (54.5%) of the survivors are still unemployed. The key reason is health conditions such as breathing difficulties, vision impairment and physical challenges, including not being able to stand or walk properly.
The report also assessed the safety of 200 current garment workers, with more than half feeling that initiatives taken by factory management were inadequate. Almost 20% of those interviewed reported that their factories lacked firefighting equipment, while 23% said emergency fire exits were not available.
Moushumi Begum, now 24, has been given a sewing machine by ActionAid Bangladesh to ease her path back to work. But she still does not dare enter a tall building.
Begum was just 14 years old. Now married with two small children, she has tried to move on, but her health continues to affect her daily activities. She suffers from acute respiratory distress syndrome, a life-threatening lung injury that makes it difficult for her to breathe. She takes regular pauses as she speaks.
Since the disaster, Begum has been too scared to step foot in another factory. “The memories of that day continue to haunt me,” she says. “I feel immense anxiety just standing near a tall building.”
Acute health conditions caused by the Rana Plaza disaster have left survivors dependent on medication.
“It has not been easy for anyone affected by Rana Plaza to return to a normal life,” says Begum, who receives counselling and financial support from ActionAid Bangladesh. The charity operates a workers’ cafe for garment workers through which Begum has acquired a free sewing machine to motivate her in returning to work. She remains reluctant: “I don’t think I’ll ever find the courage to work in one of those buildings again.”
‘How disposable we garment workers are’ … Husnara Akhtar lay for five hours under the rubble. After she was rescued, she learned her husband had died.
Husnara Akhtar, 30, remembers having breakfast with her husband, Abu Sufyan, before they went to work that day. Both worked in the Rana Plaza building, but in different factories.
As Akhtar went to her floor, she could tell something was wrong. “People were anxious; some of the workers were standing around, refusing to sit down. Someone said it wasn’t safe, but I saw the look on my manager’s face and quickly took my place on the denim line. The lights began to flicker and the floor beneath my feet shook. Within seconds, we were plunged into darkness.”
When Akhtar regained consciousness, she found herself wedged between two dead bodies. “I lay there for five whole hours unable to move,” she recalls. “It felt like a nightmare I couldn’t wake up from. There was so much dust and so many dead bodies.”
Akhtar was eventually found by rescue workers and taken to a nearby hospital, where she discovered the extent of her injuries: concussion, cracked ribs and fractured arms that would make it impossible for her to work again.
Sufyan’s body was found a week later, crushed under a concrete pillar. “My husband was just one of the hundreds of workers that died that day,” says Akhtar tearfully. “I remember looking at his crumpled body and thinking how disposable we garment workers are.”
Safiya Khatun searched for 15 days for her son. On day 16, she found out he was dead.
Safiya Khatun cries whenever she thinks about what happened that day. She was in the Savar district of Dhaka when she heard a deafening sound. “It felt like the world was ending,” recalls the 66-year-old, who watched as people began to panic. “Someone said a bomb had exploded. Another said a building had collapsed. Then I heard the words Rana Plaza and my heart sank.”
Khatun rushed to the scene, where her 18-year-old son, Lal Miah, worked as a seamster on the third floor. She spent the next 15 days desperately searching for him. She carried a passport-sized photo of him and asked rescue workers at the site if they had seen him. On the 16th day, one recognised him.
A mother’s last hope: the photo of 18-year-old garment worker Lal Miah.
When Khatun saw her son’s body, she could barely breathe. “How could something like this happen to my precious son? The collapse of Rana Plaza left thousands of mothers like me empty-handed. It was a tragedy that could have been avoided if only the owners had listened to the workers’ concerns.”
The family now live in poverty because her son was the earner. Khatun lives in a small hut made from bamboo and metal scraps. “I was given land as compensation for the loss of my dear boy but nothing can compensate us for what we have gone through.” Many of the victims’ families were given land, but most cannot afford to build homes on it.
In Savar today, garment workers walk past an enormous pair of granite fists grasping a hammer and sickle – a monument erected in memory of Rana Plaza victims. Around the monument, on the land where Rana Plaza once stood, only weeds and litter mark the spot.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
An independent Scotland has not been hindered by Nicola Sturgeon’s departure; it could well be advanced by it. Her eight years as first minister have been remarkable, but failed to bring statehood closer to reality. The question is whether her intransigence postponed it.
Sturgeon made a strategic error after her predecessor Alex Salmond lost the 2014 independence referendum. She assumed her charisma could swiftly erode the 55% turnout for continued union with England and secure a victorious rerun of the poll. Despite her electoral successes, she never seriously dented that majority. All Sturgeon could do was plunge an ever more visceral anti-Englishness into courtroom battles with London that she was never likely to win.
Salmond had in 2014 foolishly rejected David Cameron’s offer of a second referendum option for so-called “devo max”, a radically enhanced Scottish autonomy. This would certainly have passed, with polls indicating 66% support among Scottish voters. While devo max was a constitutional can of worms, it could not have been wished away. It should have begun a drastic restructuring of the Scottish economy away from dependence on – and therefore control from – London. At very least it would have put serious autonomy within the realm of plausibility.
The question now is how far could a new SNP leader take such a move towards greater autonomy forward, possibly aided by sensible and open-minded leaders of the Labour and Tory parties. To Sturgeon, the issue bordered on the theological. As with Salmond, it was freedom or bust, independence or serfdom. They wanted their own currency, their own debt, a hard border with England, membership of the EU and no UK weapons on Scottish soil. This was fantasy enough but at no point did it engage in the elephant in the independence room – economics.
Alex Salmond in 2014 foolishly rejected David Cameron’s offer of a second referendum option for so-called “devo max”. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian
Gazing across the Irish Sea, we can all study Ireland’s experience since independence a century ago, when under British rule it was among the poorest nations in Europe. Depending on definition, it is today one of the most prosperous. But it took Dublin 50 years of austerity and pain – including a meagre welfare state – to get there. Not until the 1980s did it achieve such key indicators of growth as a net inflow of investment, population and talent, and “Celtic tiger” status.
There is no tartan tiger. Sturgeon’s leadership enabled the Scots to have their cake and eat it. Her fierce nationalism gave voters emotional satisfaction. She ran hospitals, schools, trains, law and order, while Covid gave Scotland a degree of administrative discretion. Limited scope to raise top income taxes allowed a generous family support package and free student tuition. But this did not deliver the Scottish people conspicuously better services, and it depended heavily on an annual subsidy from London.
Scotland’s budget deficit in 2020-21 of 22% of GDP was among the largest of any nation in the western world, though surging oil and gas revenues have recently cut it back. Similarly sized Denmark runs a surplus of 4%. The annual UK government grant to Scotland announced last October was a record £41bn. This is money a Scottish treasury would have to find on its own, which is why Scotland’s standard of living needs union into the foreseeable future. As Ireland shows, there is a path out of dependency, but it is neither easy nor swift.
‘Federalism covers a spectrum of options but its purpose is to offer Scotland a freer hand to raise and spend public money’: the Scottish parliament building at Holyrood in Edinburgh. Photograph: Jane Barlow/PA
Federal constitutions in Spain, Switzerland and Germany indicate that the key to autonomy lies in fiscal freedom, in the capacity to grow, earn and spend, independent of policies ordained by a central government. The Basques and the Swiss cantons enjoy fiscal discretions unthinkable to the British Treasury – but the key lies in fiscal self-sufficiency. Advocates of independence persistently fail to confront this.
There is no reason why Scotland cannot approach the prosperity of Ireland or Scandinavia. Decades of reliance on the most centralist political economy in Europe – that of the UK – have crippled Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. Devo max might aim to embrace some of Ireland’s libertarian taxes along with Norway’s links to the EU’s single market. It might conceivably join with Northern Ireland in its revitalised Brexit protocol, ingeniously returning to the EU’s trading regime and yet free to trade with England. A digital border would be complicated, as Ireland is showing, but it would honour the clear vote of a majority of Scots against Brexit.
The concept of devo max – so-called “full fiscal autonomy” or “radical federalism” – is now debated by many on the fringes of the independence debate, in Wales as well as Scotland. The effort is to move forward from political confrontation. Federalism covers a spectrum of options but its purpose is to offer Scotland a freer hand to raise and spend public money, while offering London relief from a heavy burden in Scotland. It would be what Ireland was denied by England in the 19th century, true home rule under the crown. Had it been granted, the old United Kingdom might still be one.
As for Sturgeon’s successor, such an outcome could deliver a new Scotland mercifully at peace with London. Or it could prepare a path to full independence if that were, in my view sadly, to be Scotland’s eventual choice.
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
I spent my early adulthood in South Africa during the apartheid era. In 1974, the government passed a law stipulating that all lessons for black children had to be in Afrikaans, which most could not speak, and which was considered the language of the oppressor. By 1976, Black schoolchildren took to the streets of Soweto to protest and were met with police violence, with over 176 deaths. It was then that the tide turned, the protest movement grew and people worldwide became more aware of the injustices of apartheid.
Sensing the country was on the cusp of change, I went out to try to photograph what was happening around me. I was in my early 20s and working for a company that printed magazines, so I’d take my own pictures at weekends. I’d had no photographic training and because I could hardly afford film, I bought bulk reels of black and white, which were cheaper. I had to limit the number of exposures I could make due to the cost, and used cat litter trays for developing the silver gelatin prints.
I had a manual Canon FTb camera and a standard 50mm lens, which approximates the field of view of the eye. I would visit and photograph squatter towns where Black people were living as family units in defiance of the labour laws, and I also went to District Six, a mixed-race community where homes were demolished and the inhabitants evicted to make way for white housing. I’d knock on doors and ask if I could photograph people in their homes.
When I took pictures of people on the streets, they were often absorbed in their own worlds. I spotted the couple in this photograph in Green Point, Cape Town, near where I lived. The man was tenderly caring for his sick partner, and a smartly dressed woman walked past them, totally oblivious to their existence. The man looked up at her and the white of his eye caught the light as I took the picture. There are two other photographs I took showing a pair of white kids walking past the same couple without appearing to notice them, and then on their return journey, eating ice creams they’d just bought.
I felt my pictures needed to be seen and a local publisher was interested in producing a book, which reached the dummy stage before he decided the project was going to be too risky. But a photograph I sent to the British Journal of Photography made their front page in 1977, so that same month I packed a box of prints into a suitcase and flew to Heathrow. I only had a couple of dozen or so prints, and lent these to the International Defence and Aid Fund, which campaigned to defend people in race trials and raise awareness of apartheid internationally. My pictures were exhibited and published widely and, as a consequence, I was unable to return to South Africa until apartheid was abolished over 13 years later.
Under apartheid, anti-racist behaviour was spurned by the government, interracial sex was illegal and the best jobs, housing and education were strictly reserved for whites. One of the other photographs I brought to the UK is a portrait of a man I worked with at the printing company. He was an experienced technician, but I remember once asking him to prepare two exposures on a contact sheet. He had to remind me he was only allowed to make one exposure, as two were classed as “skilled” work, which was reserved for white technicians.
Apartheid, meaning “apartness”, was a deliberate process of engendering indifference between the races, which I think this photograph demonstrates. When you walk into my new exhibition at Leicester Art Gallery, it’s the first picture that strikes you, because it has been printed a couple of metres tall. There’s a resonance when people realise that such social and economic differences are still present 45 years later. The difference with this image is that the couple were denied equal opportunities by law.
After the end of apartheid and the election of Nelson Mandela, I trawled through the old negatives, discovering images I’d forgotten I had. I became a wildlife photographer in midlife and now it feels like the photographs I took at 23 belong to another lifetime. They act as a poignant reminder of why history must never be buried or forgotten and how we need to be constantly reminded of such injustices to help prevent them from happening again.
Steve Bloom’s CV
Photographer Steve Bloom
Born: Johannesburg, 1953 Trained: Self-taught Influences: “Photojournalist W Eugene Smith, with his powerful features in Life magazine.” High point: “Seeing my first photography book roll off the press. It’s the knowledge that the images will be seen. I think reaching an audience is a joy for any photographer.” Low point: “The phone call from a processing lab in the analogue film days to say that there had been a chemical ‘incident’ and the films I had brought back from a shoot in Kenya had been destroyed.” Top tip: “In this age of billions of pictures being made each day, it’s tempting to take multiple pictures of the same subject without actually concentrating too much on composition, lighting and timing. Photograph as if you only get one chance at it, and that discipline will sharpen your creative mind.”
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( With inputs from : www.theguardian.com )
Mumbai: Director-producer Aditya Chopra, who is known to be a very private person and seldom comes out in the media, has shared his opinion on his brother Uday Chopra not becoming a star.
He said that privilege can only open first doors for actors in the film industry. After that, the audience decides whom they want to watch, admire and appreciate.
In the recently released Netflix docu-series ‘The Romantics’, the YRF honcho, said: “One of the things that people tend to ignore, is that every person who comes from a privileged background is not successful. I can articulate it without mentioning other people. I can just articulate it by mentioning my own family.”
He further mentioned: “My brother is an actor, and he’s not a very successful actor. Here is the son of one of the biggest filmmakers. He’s the brother of a very big filmmaker. Imagine a company like YRF who has launched so many newcomers, we could not make him a star.”
In conclusion, he said that only the audience has the power in showbiz to make someone a star.
“Why could we not do it for our own? The bottom line is, only an audience will decide ‘I like this person, I want to see this person’. No one else.”
San Francisco: Apple’s AirTag has helped a passenger to track his lost wallet, even after American Airlines could not find it.
Taking to the micro-blogging platform Twitter, the passenger shared the incident on Sunday.
He mentioned that after realising that he lost his wallet, he contacted American Airlines and they said that they couldn’t find it.
Luckily, he had AirTag in his wallet with which he was able to track it.
After tracking, he discovered that the wallet was on the plane and had gone over to 35 cities.
Later, the airline replied to the passenger’s post, “Oh no, we’re sorry you left your wallet behind. Join us in DMs with your record locator, description and Lost and Found claim number.”
Last month, it was reported that the tracking device had helped Air Canada passengers to find their missing luggage which was on a different continent after a flight.
