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Gulf Labor is a coalition of artists and activists who have been working since 2011 to highlight the coercive recruitment, and unjust living and working conditions of migrant laborers in Abu Dhabi’s Saadiyat Island - translated as the Island of Happiness. Their 52 Weeks campaign focuses on the workers who are building the Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, Louvre Abu Dhabi, and the Sheikh Zayed National Museum (in collaboration with the British Museum).

Image of Gulf workers (c) Human Rights Watch

52 Weeks is a one year campaign which has just launched. Artists, writers and activists from different cities and countries are invited to contribute a work, text or action each week that relates to or highlights the coercive recruitment and deplorable living and working conditions of migrant labourers in Abu Dhabi. In the first weeks there have been contributions by Doug Ashford, Doris Bittar, Sam Durant, Matthew Greco, Gulf Labor, Hans Haacke, Thomas Hirschhorn, Lynn Love, Guy Mannes-Abbott, Naeem Mohaiemen, Walid Raad, Oliver Ressler, Andrew Ross, Jayce Salloum, Ann Sappenfield and Gregory Sholette. The coming weeks will see contributions by Haig Aivazian, Shaina Anand, Ayreen Anastas, Yto Berrada, Noel Doublas, Rana Jaleel, Rene Gabri, Mariam Ghani, Maryam Monalisa Gharavi, Josh MacPhee, Marina Naprushkina, Shirin Neshat, Ashok Sukumaran, WBYA (Who Builds Your Architecture) and many others.

Walid Raad, a member of Gulf Labor stated:

If the Guggenheim, Louvre and TDIC [Tourism, Development & Investment Company. Abu Dhabi] were willing to invest as much energy and resources into safeguarding the rights of workers buildings museums on Saadiyat Island, as they are on hiring “starchitects,” building engineering marvels, and buying challenging artworks, then their claims of building the best infrastructure for the arts in the world would be more than words in the wind. Abu Dhabi, its residents and workers, deserve more than the “edgy” buildings and collections proposed by the best museum-brands in the world. Abu Dhabi also deserves the development, implementation and enforcement of the most progressive labor laws for their emerging institutions. If the museums can’t see this, then I can only hope that the ruling Sheikhs and Sheikhas will, and soon.

Doris Bittar, a member of Gulf Labor stated:

Appearances are deceiving. The workers building the museums in Abu Dhabi look neat in their blue uniforms and hard hats. Their cared for appearance belie the facts that many are working 15-hour shifts, have had their passports confiscated and cannot leave or quit, they cannot congregate or collectively make demands regarding their lack of pay and their poor living conditions, and they have no recourse if they are physically abused because of unenforced labour laws. Sometimes, the only way they can leave and be sent home is in caskets.

Naeem Mohaiemen, a member of Gulf Labor stated:

We note efforts to always push blame down the human-labour supply chain: corrupt middlemen, "illiterate" workers, or recruitment agencies in the origin countries. This avoids acknowledgement of the overwhelming power, and responsibility, in the hands of institutions in Abu Dhabi and within the Euro-American art axis.

Guy Mannes-Abbott, a member of Gulf Labor stated to me in an extended commentary:

The migrant community in the UAE makes up some 80% of the population, most of whom have very few rights as such and those [that they have] are very poorly monitored, or easily got around - with the help of [sometimes] vulnerable non-Emiratis. However while there are movements for political reform in all Gulf countries including the UAE this permanent population-in-flux is not included in those fights for citizenship and potential constitutional rights as political subjects. One aim here is to help make such a migrant subject thinkable on a global scale.

This is the point at which individuals, who are often working in "conditions of forced labour" according to Human Rights Watch, because of coercive and illicit recruitment fees equivalent to some two years of earnings [and which incur extortionate and hugely inflated interest rates] for construction workers, link to broader locations, narratives and collectives in a globalised economy. In November 2012 PriceWaterhouseCooper, appointed by Abu Dhabi's TDIC despite compromising links in the Gulf and Gulf Labor's alternative suggestions, reported that 75% of construction workers on Saadiyat had paid recruitment fees and other costs. The response from TDIC has been to demand receipts (!) and to sack even PriceWaterhouseCooper at the end of that year…

The average income in Abu Dhabi is about $30,000 while the average income for migrant construction workers is less than 10% of that. In Qatar, the average income is over $70,000.

The Louvre Abu Dhabi has gotten underway with workers trapped by these recruitment fees, many of them - 40% according to PriceWaterhouseCooper, despite an "obligation" on contractors to house employees there - not living in the official accommodation provided on Saadiyat. The official accommodation is a metal-walled camp for up to 40,000 men, almost all of whom originate from South Asia. The Louvre Abu Dhabi is happy to pay these labouring men about $2500-3000 a year and watch others being deported for pleading for a few hundred dollars more per year to eat properly, while itself receiving $17,500,000 a year for 30 years from Abu Dhabi for the use of the 'Louvre' brand alone. The total package is worth well over a billion dollars and includes various sweeteners built in and around Paris for the French government too.

UAE is a signatory to International Labour Organisation conventions but has not implemented laws on the right to organise and collectively bargain or form a union. There is a minimum wage on the books but it has not come in to law. Both of these would enable these often basely exploited people to address their situation fairly and with dignity as well as to transform their experience into one of meaningful sacrifice. Meanwhile, if a worker on Saadiyat wants to lodge a complaint, which is a legal right, he has to get it in writing and hand-deliver it either to Dubai or another spot in Abu Dhabi notably distant from the camp which even in Abu Dhabi is officially classified as "remote". He can only do that on a day off and on that day off, Friday, these ministry buildings are closed…

Poster launching Gulf Labor 52 Weeks...
at 2013 Venice Biennale

Gulf Labor is intent on raising standards and extending aspirations. Richard Armstrong, Director of the Guggenheim Foundation has described the Gehry-designed Museum he wants to build on these foundations as a "beacon" of cultural exchange: brightly-lit meaninglessness. Instead, Gulf Labor is intent on turning that light into the dark corners of this enterprise to remind the world and the UAE of the hopes, dreams and legitimate expectations of the human beings whose lives are being defined by their experience today.

The Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, like the Louvre Abu Dhabi, is presently on course to memorialise "conditions of forced labour". There is time, occasion and opportunity to change that. The UAE is trying to achieve something very remarkable, very fast but doing it like this undermines otherwise laudable ambitions and legitimate aspirations.

With thanks to Gulf Labor and in particular Guy Mannes-Abbott. Bidisha is a 2013 International Reporting Project Fellow reporting on global health and development issues.

A news bulletin sent around earlier this year by Dr Carole Presern, Executive Director of The Partnership for Maternal, Newborn and Child Health, threw down the gauntlet for the world community. At the time of the G8 summit – which I covered here in relation to the Enough Food For Everyone IF… campaign – the PMNCH highlighted the importance of nutrition. Since then I have found the work and the general approach of the PMNCH to be invaluable in joining the dots between various global health and development issues now that world leaders and development workers are considering a framework for initiatives extending beyond 2015.

The result of this summer’s discussions and presentations was the signing, by numerous international players, of the Global Nutrition forGrowth Compact, with up to $4.15 billion committed on this initiative up to 2020. Those who contributed to this strong pledge for a reduction in under-nutrition included the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, World Vision and Save the Children.

As Dr Presern writes,

Leaders should be especially motivated to see pledges result in measurable action. Bringing commitments to invest in nutrition under the umbrella of the Every Woman Every Child movement led by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon would provide a useful framework for tracking their progress. We look forward to supporting efforts in this direction.

All of these issues are already very high on the international agenda. At the 66^th meeting of the World Health Assembly in Geneva in May this year, global delegates passed a resolution to implement the recommendations of the United Nations Commission on Life-Saving Commodities for Women and Children and also discussed a first-ever action plan pertaining to newborn health to end preventable deaths, which will be realised at the 2014 World Health Assembly.

At the Nutrition for Growth event in June, Justine Greening MP from the Department for International Development spoke about the importance of nutrition as a major development issue. She also outlined the financial pledges made by the international community of leaders in politics, social enterprise and business. She added,

Under-nutrition is stopping children and countries from reaching their full potential, accounting for the loss of billions of dollars in productivity. A strong and healthy workforce is vital if a country’s economy is to prosper. This means business and science taking a lead in fighting for good nutrition because we understand that better nutrition is the smart way to tackle extreme poverty, child mortality and economic underachievement.

What has to happen next is an integration of understanding between the issues – and, I would argue, an analysis of how gender inequality and sexist social values underpin many of the disadvantages, risks and problems covered.

The PMNCH’s own research provides a nuanced analysis of the relationship between nutrition, sustainable development and women’s and children’s health. Their findings were developed for the Open Working Group of the UN General Assembly in preparation for the formation of post-2015 development plans. They make a strong case for the importance of investment in nutrition for women and children as a major factor in ensuring sustainable development and its four pillars of economic development, environmental sustainability, social inclusion and peace and security; these criteria having been delineated by the UN System Taskforce on Sustainable Development.

This is about more than being hungry or not getting the right vitamins or minerals. Malnutrition and under-nutrition, rooted in long term poverty, inequality and disadvantage, have wideranging and interconnected health, social and economic consequences which do not affect just individuals but entire families, communities and generations. Their finding – spelled out in greater detail here, with references to specific studies – demonstrate myriad risks of malnutrition.

The report states,

Malnutrition contributes to disease and early deaths, especially for women and children. Malnourished women have lower birth weight babies resulting in children born into unhealthy, poorer families… and a lifetime of nutrition-related morbidity and mortality, which affects a woman’s own health and productivity and that of her offspring.

What is particularly interesting about the report is that it doesn’t just chronicle a problem, it also points to the benefits of action, stating that improved nutrition and greater health result in higher productivity. The findings are that women who are healthy, fed and working participate in the economy from a stronger position, both saving and investing. Healthy, well-nourished children have better mental development and learning skills and are more likely to stay in education and therefore to have a greater chance of earning more. The report points out that those who did not receive adequate nutrition in utero and in their earliest years “has been associated with reduced labor supply” and consequently lower adult incomes and therefore lower productivity at a mass level, across countries, where under-nutrition is widespread.

Whether or not you agree with this approach – that we should nourish human beings because they’ll then nourish capitalism more heartily instead of lying there like non labour producing duds - rather than seeing this as a human rights issue – it’s an interesting insight into the dramatic difference something as basic as nutrition can make.

There is also the cost of treating malnutrition:

In some low-income countries, the direct costs of iron deficiency (disease and death) are as high as 0.57% of GDP, while indirect costs (related to physical and cognitive losses) can reach 4% of GDP.8

As a final thing to think about, the PMNCH also considers the risks and consequences to the health and the economy of too much food (and of the wrong time), not just too little food. In environments where the issue is not lack of food but over-consumption of food which is not nutritional and involves many risky factors (processed and refined food, food containing many additives and few nutrients, food high in salt, sugar and trans fats) there is an ever-rising figure, currently up to 8% of healthcare spending, associated with obesity. In China, right now, the cost of dealing with obesity is actually more than the economic costs associated with under-nutrition.

Bidisha is a 2013 International Reporting Project Fellow reporting on global health and development.

Please find below a selected Greatest Hits of my journalism from the last few years. The majority of the links will take you to The Guardian, The Huffington Post and this site. A constantly updated list of recent articles can always be found by clicking here and further down that page are links to some older features. My latest piece is Dear Internet, I'm just going for a walk. I may be some time.

Global issues:

UK society:

The arts and culture:

Emotional violence and social power:

Earlier this year I chaired a panel with Joan Smith, Baroness Helena Kennedy and the novelist Kishwar Desai. We were discussing male sexual violence in India, following the worldwide protests about the rape, torture and murder of a young woman in Delhi. The event, at The Nehru Centre in London, was held to launch Desai's latest novel Sea of Innocence, which tackles the same issue and also provides shocking details of the Delhi case which hadn't previously been revealed in the media. In its ability to combine a strong heroine with a thrilling plot and urgent contemporary issues, Sea of Innocence follows on from Desai's previous novel The Origins of Love, which looked at the Indian international surrogacy trade.

The conversation during the Sea of Innocence launch event was wideranging. We looked at all aspects of global rape culture, which transcends colour, religion, class, language, country, culture and hemisphere: the blaming of victims, the excusal of perpetrators, the prejudice against survivors of sexual violence, the silencing and abusing of survivors who speak out, extreme and perverse leniency towards perpetrators even when they are convicted. Male sexual violence, which is endemic, reflects, partially creates and also reinforces women's inequality, disempowerment and subjugation. This disempowerment is obvious in every area: in the discrimination against us in the workplace; in the exploitation of our labour, which is unpaid, under-paid, under-valued and over-consumed; in the denial of our rights over our own bodies; in the casual and constant judging, slandering, undermining and defamation which constitutes the majority of all comments made to and about women; in the way we are represented in mainstream culture, images, advertising and the media as silent pieces of nice-looking meat, pathetic and useless idiots or bitter, petty, malicious schemers; and in the strong resistance against female education, landholding, powerful visibility, money-making, public involvement, mobility in public spaces (which is delimited by harassment and threat), enfranchisement, leadership, influence, direction and presence. Writing specifically on rape culture, structural misogyny and gender inequality in India, there is a brilliant analysis by Tehelka Media which I urge everyone to read.

As UNIFEM states, "One woman in three will be raped, beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused in her lifetime." Male violence against women is so common that it has been described by the World Health Organisation as being "of epidemic proportions." Read the major, multi-national WHO study into domestic violence and see why they identify it as "a major public health and human rights problem throughout the world."

After the Sea of Innocence panel discussion I was approached by an impressive woman, Santosh Bhanot, who told me that she was involved in a project called The Circle, in affiliation with Oxfam. The Circle aims to address some of the fundamental issues and abuses which keep women worldwide in a state of disempowerment and inhibit our equality and our access to justice, rights and autonomy. Another underlying goal is to lift women out of poverty through gender empowerment.

The issue of poverty, often spoken of in general terms, is starkly gendered. According to Oxfam,

Of the 1.3 billion people living in extreme poverty worldwide, more than two thirds are women and girls.

Women and girls are the most disadvantaged of the disadvantaged, the most abused of the abused and the most exploited of the exploited. This has not arisen by some kind of unfortunate, fated magic but directly through the actions of patriarchal systems and many individual but misogynistically and patriarchally like-minded perpetrators, users and exploiters. When we defy all silencing and stigma to speak about what we have undergone we suffer the further grotesque abuse of being blamed for men's abuse of us, told that we deserve it, told that we brought it on ourselves by our own behaviour or told that we are lying out of malice to hurt men. We are then punished further by being slandered, marginalised or ostracised.

As Everjoice Win from ActionAid International, South Africa, states in a report about how helping women and girls is the key to ending poverty,

We believe that women are vulnerable and more impoverished compared to men because they have been systematically made vulnerable by years of violence, patriarchal power and control, as well as decades of inequitable laws and policies deliberately designed to put them in this position.

The Circle was founded in 2008 by Annie Lennox with the aim of connecting high profile, culturally influential women of expertise in various areas. A network of Circles will raise consciousness and money (here's the catch: money for Oxfam) to spend on a range of grassroots projects tackling everything from poverty to education to maternal health. They will also work "to reduce all forms of violence towards women, by helping to change attitudes."

The idea is that the various Circles support specific projects of interest but are all part of the wider Circle ethos of women helping women to change the world for everyone. A group called The Lawyers' Circle supports women's legal rights in Africa; The Music Circle raises money to protect women in the Democratic Republic of Congo; The Oxford Circle is looking at improving health and education in Niger and hopes to engage Oxford University and local city businesses in supporting this aim.

So far, significant money has been raised for a broad range of change-making initiatives. In Zambia the Circle project, working with Oxfam, is helping community schools. These are volunteer-run initiatives which provide vital education for one million Zambian children. However, those involved require more training and resources; the Circle's work in this area benefits 18,000 students in 25 schools and strongly supports the education of girls.

In Pakistan the We Can project is a grassroots initiative aiming to reach 800,000 people in combating "endemic" male violence against women, advocating for it to be reported and investigated and for a social shift which recognises male violence against women as abuse rather than normalising it and blaming victims rather than perpetrators.

The Circle has been working on improving maternal healthcare in Ghana, where 75 women a week die due to complications in pregnancy and childbirth. The focus here is on the provision of free healthcare to reduce maternal mortality. This is an achievable goal: other, non-Oxfam projects worldwide have shown the marked success of dedicated maternal mortality, pre- and ante-natal and newborn health projects. Please see my reports on Sierra Leone and Burundi and India for more details.

Two women's co-ops in Liberia have been helped to provide women with tools and training and empower them to bargain for better terms in a country in which, says Oxfam, "80% of ...women are unemployed." One little note to make here to correct that subtle patriarchal diss: these women, I can bet you, are employed. They are totally employed, to the point of exhaustion. They are employed in the never-ending, repetitive, back-breaking, all-consuming drudge labour of looking after the children, serving the men, running a household, cooking, cleaning and everything else - and these are all separate jobs - and their work is used and taken and exploited for free. They are paid nothing for their 24-hours, 7-day-a-week employment and it is callous and disrespectful to say that these same women are "unemployed." It is more accurate to say that they are exploited in an unjust situation. Despite the work they do, they are economically dependent on men and marginalised by them from economic power, political status, public influence and social clout. This exploitation and depletion of energy, financial and legal marginalisation and political discrimination mean that it is difficult for women to fight together for equality, rights and freedom from violence.

The latest addition to the Circle network is The Asian Circle, which works alongside Oxfam in helping South Asian women. It was founded and is chaired by Santosh Bhanot, the woman I met at the Kishwar Desai event. The focus is wide: The Asian Circle will be pulling together high profile women to support projects in agriculture, education, disaster relief and management, poverty reduction and sustainable development.

The Asian Circle was launched at the Houses of Parliament on 7th November 2013 in an event chaired by BBC reporter Ayshea Buksh and featuring speeches by Southall Black Sisters activist and journalist Rahila Gupta (read some of her human rights focused pieces here) and Kishwar Desai.

Santosh Bhanot spoke at the launch of The Asian Circle:

This week she told me,

Our focus is to work towards change with the skills and talents of ...[the] women who are part of the Asian Circle, a group of passionate and highly influential women from all walks of life. I wanted to help women who have an unfair chance in life and I particularly have passion and energy to work with women in South Asia because of my roots [as a South Asian woman]. Every woman has basic human rights.

On my recent visit to India I saw the positive impact of programs by Oxfam working with vulnerable women. For instance, building support centres for women subject to domestic violence and providing mediation and legal support. More programs are needed, especially in the poorer states.

The first programme The Asian Circle is supporting is called "Promoting Violence Free Lives." According to the Indian National Family Health Survey Round III report of 2005-2006 and the Oxfam India 2010 Baseline Survey, the statistics are damning, as are the social values which have been revealed:

35% of women suffer sexual or non-sexual violence in India
72% of men believe male violence against women is justified
68% of women believe that husbands are justified in beating wives

Rahila Gupta welcomes the connection between the feminism, profile and zeal of The Asian Circle and the structural support Oxfam can provide:

This is the launch of a very important initiative. If my last 24 years with Southall Black Sisters has taught me anything, it is this: funding, funding, funding. The time that we would like to spend delivering frontline services is spent instead on raising funds without which we'd have no money to deliver anything. So it's great that the Asian Circle aims to help Violence Against Women projects in India escape that vicious cycle.

The Asian Circle is focusing on the poorest states with a multi-tiered, thorough strategy: to build support centres in police stations for women who have suffered gendered violence; to engage community elders, young men and boys through educational initiatives to change their attitudes and their behaviour; and to develop networks of women working at a state level to make sure that domestic violence laws are implemented rather than ignored.

Kishwar Desai told me,

As someone who has been trying to raise awareness about some very disturbing gender issues in India for a while now, I am sincerely grateful to see the formation of The Asian Circle. My personal hope? That they will be the catalyst, eventually, for providing an international platform for Asian women, perhaps leading to a women's liberation movement in Asia.

Bidisha is a 2013 International Reporting Project fellow, covering global health and development.

The careers of three of the most influential figures of the early Bombay film industry began on the stages and screens of London’s West End theatres and cinemas. As Sanjeev Bhaskar reveals in a new documentary, Lights, Camera, Akshun!, screenwriter Niranjan Pal, producer/actor Himansu Rai and actress Devika Rani all first found fame in Britain and learned much of their craft in the surprisingly cosmopolitan film industry centred in London between the wars.

Drawing on recent original research, Sanjeev Bhaskar pieces together a tale of two Indian men and one Indian woman who crossed barriers of race, sex, language and geography to create some of the most striking films of the early era and enter the hearts and minds of British audiences.

Their films include the pioneering feature-length silent epic The Light of Asia which received a Royal Command performance at Windsor Castle in 1926 and the early talkie Karma (made in English) which premiered in Marble Arch in 1933, featured Indian cinema’s longest kiss and made an international star of Devika Rani.

Seeta Devi and Himansu Right in Light of Asia

Lights, Camera, Akshun! has been produced by Mukti Jain Campion and with associate producer Suman Bhuchar and is A Culture Wise Production for BBC Radio 4. It will be broadcast on Sunday 24th November at 1.30pm and available to listen to on iPlayer for a week after that.

Associate producer Suman Buchar filled me in on the intentions behind the doc:

"I have always been passionate about popular Indian cinema (now called Bollywood) and... was aware of these names of the personalities of Niranjan Pal, Himanshu Rai & Devika Rani as they are in the history books, Indian film encyclopaedias. But perhaps, new histories of cinema do not take cognisance of the past in the same way. Having said, over the last 20-30 years research into this area has grown.

"Some sterling work has been done by South Asian Cinema whose founders, Lalit Mohan Joshi and Kusum Pant Joshi – are interviewed in the documentary. In August 2011, they produced a book, Niranjan Pal: A Forgotten Legend, which incorporated essays & Pal’s own autobiography, Such is Life. I have also come across the name of Niranjan Pal in relation to Asian theatre, which is where Pal began his artistic life in London. There is another wonderful reference book, written by Prof. Colin Chambers, Black and Asian Theatre in Britain: A History, which also sheds light into Pal’s theatrical efforts.

"When you really look into the paths forged by these early artists some interesting things emerge: firstly the struggle for Asian artists in Britain, has the same issues and priorities: authenticity in portrayal in stories; practical problems of doing productions; and challenging stereotypes. All remain the same even 100 years later, and to learn about how Pal and Rai made the situation work for themselves is both informative and engaging.

"London was the capital of the British Empire (and centre of the global film industry) so it was natural that many young Indians would come here came to study. Some like Niranjan Pal were fired up with the idea
of ‘revolution’ when he arrived in 1908 /9 but soon discovered that the ordinary English man was not like the officers who ruled them back home (Niranjan Pal, was the son of the moderate nationalist leader, Bipin Chandra Pal).He was surprised and gratified to discover that ‘ordinary Englishmen’ took them to their bosom – so had to alter his views. In fact, it was Charles Urban (an Anglo-American film mogul of the silent era) who gave Niranjan Pal his first break by buying his script for Light of Asia in around 1912, paying him £500 (probably around £48,000 now) so for a first time fledgling scriptwriter who was basically sending out a cold call letter & an unsolicited script this sum was not be sniffed at!

"Urban also invited Pal to come to his studios in Surbiton to learn the craft of film-making, because as he wrote to Pal and as Pal puts it: “He wrote that the story showed I had good ideas but was totally ignorant of
the limitations of the movie camera.”

"The early young Indians were almost like the artistic Asian community in Britain today using arts and culture as a means of giving a positive image about India – and in today’s terms would be seen as ‘soft power’
to free India.

"Himansu Rai was studying to be a lawyer and he got involved in a play that Pal had written – this play The Goddess (1922) was a massive West End hit playing at the Duke of York Theatre. All the cast were amateur Indians (students, professionals etc). Pal & Rai hit it off and set up The Indian Players to promote, as they say, a “renaissance of Indian dramatic art”. Devika Rani used to be a lodger in Pal’s house – and that’s how they all got together.

The front titles of The Light of Asia, screening in the late 1920s, ran as follows:

The Indian Players present The Light of Asia By NIRANJAN PAL

This unique film was produced entirely in India without the aid of studio sets or artificial lights, faked up properties or make ups........... All the principal characters in the film are portrayed by members of the Indian Players Company, each of whom gave up his or her career as Doctor, Lawyer, Engineer and Professor to bring about a renaissance of the Dramatic art of India.

"Rai & Pal were making ‘crossover’ films well before the term was even invented and the Indian film industry got obsessed with it. They did this through their sheer charm and personality – by all accounts they were figures to be reckoned with and although they may have been ‘subjects’ their tenacity and motivation was strong. They did face barriers, but their ingenuity was what got them through – for example, after they made The Light of Asia they decided the best way to get the film promoted was to get a Royal Command Performance and Pal wrote to the King’s household, badgered the then Indian High Commissioner, Sir Atul Chatterjee to put in a good word.

"As the UK was heading towards WW2 the Pal, Rai & Rani collaboration decided to go back to India and set up Bombay Talkies, a successful studio modelled on European models which began the careers of people like Ashok Kumar, Dilip Kumar , Madhubala, Dev Anand among others – and that is another story!

"This documentary will surprise people who do not know that the evolution of Indian cinema has been a collaborative process with influences from UK and Europe. In the beginning of cinema it was a global industry (rather like the dotcom boom of the early 1990s) and everyone clamoured to be a part of it. India was part of the British Empire, and so also received short silent film reels about stuff- and a few individuals wanted to start telling their own stories.

"Sadly, the name of Niranjan Pal has been neglected. Here is a young Bengali hot head teenager who is brought to the UK by his dad, Bipin Chandra Pal ( a moderate revolutionary) because he wants to keep his son out of trouble, but the young Pal gets involved with other hotheads, before he discovers that his salvation lies in scriptwriting and the arts – first he discovers theatre, where he enjoys some success, he them moves on to the moving picture – and whenever he gets knocked somewhere, he goes off and tries another angle.

"Himanshu Rai, sadly died quite young at 48. He came from a wealthy Bengali family, came to London to be a lawyer, got into theatre then film. He’s a character and is an actor/manager/ producer type figure (like Lawrence Olivier you can say, or even Kenneth Branagh) and really moves heaven and earth to make these early silent films, The Light of Asia (1925, Prem Sanyas), Shiraz (1928) & A Throw of Dice (1929, Prapancha Pash) & Karma (1933 – Hindi version, Naagin Ki Ragini) before going to India to be the
driving force behind Bombay Talkies.

"Devika Rani ran the management of Bombay Talkies, ‘retiring’ in 1945. Bombay Talkies ran until the early 1950s then closed – so it survived WW2 and Indian independence."

Lights, Camera, Akshun! will be broadcast on Sunday 24th November at 1.30pm and available to listen to on iPlayer for a week after that.

Text (c) CultureWise, with thanks to Suman Buchar for exclusive quotes.

Trigger warning. From Karen Ingala Smith and all text (c) her:

Monday 25th November it is the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women. I’ll be highlighting the UK’s shocking record of women killed through male violence in 2013.

Starting at 6.00am, on the twitter account @countdeadwomen, I’ll be going through the UK’s diary of women killed by men. I’ll be starting with the 2nd January when Janelle Duncan Bailey was strangled by ex-boyfriend Jerome McDonald, moving on to 3rd January at 6.10, when Akua Agyuman died, two months after being stabbed in the chest and abdomen by her husband Minta Adiddo. Every 10 minutes, I’ll move through the year to commemorate all the women who I have found who were killed though men’s violence. So far I know of 112 women killed this year, so I’ll still be tweeting at midnight.

Thank you all for your support. We’ve reached 2,500 signatures now but I'm still the one doing the counting. As I've said all along, I'll keep doing it, until I'm convinced the government is doing enough!

Images of some of the women killed by male violence in the UK at a rate of 2 per week

The text on the campaign page lobbying the UK government to Stop Ignoring Dead Women [please click and sign in solidarity] reads as follows:

On New Year’s Day, 2012, 20-year-old Kirsty Treloar got a text from her boyfriend Myles Williams:

Okay wer all gud now and my new yrs ressy is that I aint going to hit u again and I won't hit u 4 this yr next yr the yr after that the next yr after that.

The next day he broke into her family’s home, stabbed her brother and sister as they tried to help, then he dragged Kirsty into the back of his mother's car and drove her away. She was found dead 2 miles away, dumped behind a wheelie bin. Kirsty had been stabbed 29 times.

Michael Atherton, 42, also sent a New Year text. Shortly before midnight, he sent a text to his partner, Susan McGoldrick, saying he was going out and would spend the night away because he didn’t like her sister Alison Turnbull, 44, with whom she was spending the evening. But Susan and Alison came home before he had left. Atherton, who held a gun licence despite a history of arrests for domestic violence dating back 10 years, shot Susan, Alison and Alison’s 24 year old daughter Tanya, before killing himself.

On New Year’s Day, Aaron Mann, 31 repeatedly hit Claire O’Connor, 38, with a blunt object before smothering her with a pillow. Her badly beaten body was found wrapped in her son’s sleeping bag and covered in a sheet in the boot of her car on January 2.

On 3rd of January John McGrory used a dog lead to strangle 39-year-old Marie McGrory. Garry Kane, 41, killed his 87-year-old grandmother Kathleen Milward, though 15 blunt force trauma injuries on her head and neck.

So, by the end of the third day of January 2012, seven women in the UK had been murdered by men, three were shot, one was strangled, one was stabbed, one was beaten then smothered and one was killed through fifteen blunt force trauma injuries. Perhaps because it was the beginning of the year, I just started counting, and once I’d started, I couldn’t stop. Since then, I’ve counted 199 women killed through suspected male violence. I urge you to read Karen Ingala Smith's site for more information.

At first I counted women killed through domestic violence. Then, on March 9th 2012, Ahmad Otak stabbed and killed Samantha Sykes, 18 and Kimberley Frank, 17. Otak wasn’t the boyfriend of either of them, but of Elisa Frank, Kimberley’s sister. After killing Kimberly and Samantha in from of Eliza, he abducted Eliza and drove to Dover in an attempt to escape to France. The murders of Samantha and Kimberley don’t fit the definition of domestic violence, but they’re absolutely about a man trying to exert power, control and coercion in his relationship. Their deaths made it clear to me that concentrating on what we see as domestic violence isn’t enough. It’s wider than that. The murders of Kimberley and Samantha by were no less about male violence against women that they would have been if he had been the boyfriend of one of them.

Then there’s Andrew Flood, a taxi-driver who strangled and robbed Margaret Biddolph, 78 and Annie Leyland, 88. When I learned he’d also robbed a third woman it was clear to me that there was a pattern to his actions. In fact, last year, five older women, aged between 75 and 88 were killed by much younger men, aged between 15 and 43 as they were robbed or mugged, including Irene Lawless, 68 who was raped, beaten and strangled by 26 year old Darren martin. The murders of Margaret, Annie andIrene were not any less about misogyny, than those of women killed by someone they were related to. So my list doesn’t just include women killed though domestic violence. We have to stop seeing the killings of women by men as isolated incidents. We have to put them together. We have to stop ignoring the connections and patterns.

The Home Office currently records and published data on homicide victims and the relationship of the victim to the principal suspect and sex of the victim. This does not do enough to tell us about fatal male violence against women:

1. It doesn’t tell us about the sex of the killer

2. It doesn’t connect the different forms of male violence against women

3. It dehumanises women.

The statistic ‘on average two women a week are killed through domestic violence in England and Wales’ is well known but we don't seem to feel horror in our response to this. The murders of some women barely cause a murmur; lots don’t make it into the national media. And so the connections, the horror, the patterns, the deaths continue in silence. Unnoticed. Ignored.

Ultimately, I want to see men stop killing women.

I have launched this campaign, Counting Dead Women because I want to see a fit-for-purpose record of fatal male violence against women. I want to see the connections between the different forms of fatal male violence against women. I want Domestic Homicide Review reports to be accessible from a single central source. I want to see a homicide review for every sexist murder. I want the government to fund an independently run Femicide Observatory , where relationships between victim and perpetrator and social, cultural and psychological issues are analysed. I want to believe that the government is doing everything it can to end male violence against women and girls. And I think the government should be recording and commemorating women killed through male violence – not me, a lone woman in a bedroom in east London

Let’s start counting dead women, not ignoring them. If you want us as a society, the press and the government to stop ignoring dead women, if you want us to find ways to stop women being killed, please join me, add your voice and sign this petition.

All text (c) Karen Ingala Smith

Image (c) Ton Koene for Doctors Without Borders

On Wednesday, December 4 Doctors Without Borders will be hosting a live online discussion about the current situation in the Central African Republic. Panelists will include MSF Director of Operations Marie-Noelle Rodrigue, who will be joined by nurse Michelle Mays and Dr. Yolaine Civil, two US-based aid workers recently returned from assignments with MSF in the Central African Republic. Register online here.

For the past year, ongoing violence in the Central African Republic has worsened the civilian population's already limited access to adequate health care. Since the takeover of the capital and overthrow of the government last March, the situation has continued to deteriorate. Rampant looting following the overthrow of the previous government and ongoing, pervasive lawlessness have contributed to a humanitarian crisis that has been largely ignored by the rest of the world. In a country that already had the second-lowest life expectancy in the world, at just 48 years, the people are now even more at risk. There is an excellent article on this by David Smith at The Guardian.

Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) has been delivering lifesaving medical care through a network of seven hospitals, two health centers, and 40 health posts, but many of the basic needs of the population remain unmet.

Join Doctors Without Borders Wednesday, December 4, for a live, online panel discussion featuring three distinct on-the-ground perspectives on the crisis in Central African Republic and on MSF's various operations.

Featuring:

Yolaine Civil, MD, a Detroit-based pediatrician who recently returned from an MSF assignment in Bossangoa, Central African Republic, which has been the site of frequent and ongoing outbreaks of violence.
Michelle Mays, RN, who spent nearly three months as project coordinator in Boguila, Central African Republic, where MSF is operating a major health center and managing around 12 regional health posts. Listen to a recent radio interview with Michelle here.
Marie-Noelle Rodrigue, MSF's Director of Operations, who has been heavily involved with setting up and managing programs in the Central African Republic for many years.

All text (c) Doctors Without Borders except for my own interjection and recommendation about David Smith's article.

Whenever I Hear The Word 'Culture' by Burak Delier, all rights (c) the artist

Turkish artist Burak Delier, whose work explores capitalism through art, has been announced as the first to benefit from Iniva's Commissions and Exhibitions Fund. Iniva (the Institute of International Visual Arts) will commission new work from the artist to be exhibited for the first time in the UK in March 2014.

The Iniva Commissions and Exhibitions Fund provides the next generation of artists from around the world with the opportunity to create new work, offering them creative freedom in terms of content and supporting them to take their careers to the next level. The Fund has been established through the proceeds of an auction of works generously donated by artists who were supported by Iniva earlier in their careers. The first works, sold at auction through Sotheby’s in February 2013, were donated by Yinka Shonibare MBE, Mona Hatoum, David Adjaye and Peter Randall-Page.

The Commissions & Exhibitions Fund is a new initiative established by Iniva as part of its work in supporting emerging artists from across the globe. Due to their location, culture or environment, many exciting artists do not always have the opportunity to challenge and discuss the world through their work. This new initiative aims to offer creative freedom, curatorial support and profile so they can take their careers to the next level. Iniva will identify and collaborate with emerging artists each year, commissioning and presenting work in order to bring important new artists to a wider public internationally.

The new commission from Burak Delier, to be shown at Iniva on Rivington Place in London from 26 March – 17 May 2014, will enable him to critique society in a way that is relevant to Turkey and beyond. Delier engages with questions of how artistic and capitalistic forms of production overlap. His practice takes on various media from video to installation and is often produced with others, whether through performances, or by the participants becoming part of his research to produce the artworks themselves.

Delier studied Fine Art at the University of Marmara and the University of Yildiz. He has had solo exhibitions in Istanbul at PILOT and OUTLET, and taken part in group exhibitions across Europe. His work was shown at the Taipei Biennial in 2008 and 2010 and the Istanbul Biennial in 2005 and 2007. Delier lives and works in Istanbul.

Tessa Jackson OBE, Chief Executive of Iniva, says

We’re delighted to be launching the first Iniva Commissions and Exhibitions Fund artist. It is important artists are given the freedom to question society and this Fund gives them the support and opportunity to do just that. Burak Delier is not only commenting on the Turkish situation, but an economic system upon which so many of our societies are based.

Iniva engages with new ideas and emerging debates in the contemporary visual arts, reflecting in particular the cultural diversity of contemporary society. Exploring key issues in society and politics, Iniva offers a platform for artistic experiment, cultural debate and the exchange of ideas. We work with artists, curators, creative producers, educationalists and the public to promote a greater understanding of diversity in a rapidly changing world.

Founded in 1994, Iniva has become highly respected for seeking out and championing artists from around the world whose work and ideas provide new perspectives on cultural identity and the diversity of society. The organisation was established to present ‘unheard voices’ and provide perspectives on art histories beyond those of Western Europe and America. Today Iniva continues to create exhibitions, education projects, digital initiatives, research and publications that explore global artistic practice. Iniva works nationally and internationally and has been based at Rivington Place, Shoreditch, London, a public building designed by architect David Adjaye OBE, since 2007.

Speaking at the launch of the Iniva Commissions and Exhibitions Fund, Chris Dercon, the director of Tate Modern, said,

The reason I got the job at the Tate Modern is simple, it was because of Iniva. Iniva and the history of Iniva created a blueprint for what I have been doing over the past twenty years, and in interviews when I became the director of Tate modern I kept referring to Iniva. The reason is simple. In 1994 Tate hosted a conference called New Internationalism...[organised] by Iniva.

...Iniva is a place for meetings, speaking and a place for encounters… and when [Tessa] calls the artists they come. Then she commissions artists like our friend here from Istanbul, he comes. And [Burak Delier] is going to address this problem of the new London and the new Istanbul, trying to give another perspective because that’s what Iniva has been doing, and only Iniva, since 1994.

For further information, please contact Truda.spruyt@fourcolmangetty.com or chris.baker@fourcolmangetty.com

All text (c) Four Colman Getty and Iniva

Lebanese film-maker Niam Itani - read a wonderful interview with her here - is working on a new documentary project about Syrian and Lebanese children, called Twice Upon A Time, which, as she tells me, "seeks to raise hope amongst refugees and parents of today." Itani has started a campaign page to raise post production funds for Twice Upon A Time and produced a trailer introducing viewers to Khalil, the charismatic and bright boy at the heart of the film:

There are only five days of the fundraising campaign left, and nearly $20,000 still to be raise for this important, humane and uplifting film project.

Niam Itani was born and raised in Beirut and Ghazzeh in Lebanon. The Lebanese Civil War lasted 15 years, consuming 9 years of her childhood. "I witnessed several periods of unrest and violence in Lebanon throughout my childhood and adult life," she tells me. "I’ve had to abandon my city and home with my family several times due to these conflicts; the longest of which lasted five years in the Bekaa Valley (a rural area of Lebanon) in a village called Ghazzeh."

Twice Upon A Time is a film drawing together themes with both political and personal resonance, highlighting the universal impact of war on children and on entire communities. In the campaign briefing Niam Itani writes the following:

"In 1989, my parents left Beirut for a small village in the Bekaa Valley called Ghazzeh. I was eight years old.

"In 2012, Khalil's mother left Syria and took refuge at our house in Ghazzeh. Khalil was ten years old.

"This film tells the story of my friendship with Khalil, and our efforts to find hope and joy in the midst of madness and despair. It is also a personal reflection on childhood, nostalgia, home, belonging, memory and war."

Khalil & Niam assemble kites together, Spring 2013

"The Lebanese Civil War (1975-1990) left behind an estimated 120,000 fatalities. A study conducted in 1992 under the title "Assessing War Trauma in Children: A Case Study of Lebanese Children" showed that "on average a Lebanese child has experienced five to six different types of traumatic events during his or her lifetime; some events were experienced several times." (Journal of Refugee Studies, 1992, Macksoud)

"Twenty-three years later, in what I'd like to think of as a civilized and sophisticated world that we live in, another armed conflict took the same trajectory as the Lebanese one, with more horrifying outcomes. By September 2013, less than three years after its beginning, the Syrian Crisis had left more than 120,000 fatalities and 2 million refugees. The numbers grow on a daily basis. [Read my coverage of the Syrian humanitarian crisis here.]

"Seeing these two conflicts happen in such a short period of time in history and in two neighboring countries is heart wrenching for me. The most devastating part is that I am forced to watch more children grow in the same damaging conditions that my generation grew up with.

This is not another film about children who are orphaned, hungry or homeless seeking food and shelter during war. This is a film about children with caring and loving parents, coming from middle class families like most of us, but finding themselves in the cruellest human condition of all: war."

Khalil & his siblings pose for a photo before school, Spring 2013

"By telling this story, I hope to bring more understanding and awareness about this issue and to mobilize additional psychological and material support for children refugees around the globe.

"On July 31st, 2012, Khalil's family crossed the Syrian Border into Lebanon to flee the armed conflict in their country. My mother gave them refuge at our summer property in Ghazzeh, in the Lebanese countryside. That is where I met Khalil (12 years) who would later change the course of this project, and therefore, my life.

"But the journey of this film started much before the arrival of Khalil's family to Lebanon, and before the Syrian Crisis altogether.

"It began in 2010 as an attempt to fill memory blanks pertaining to my childhood during the civil war in Beirut. I was searching for "nice memories" during the period between 1980 and 1989, which seem to have vanished from my memory."

This photo of Niam was taken on May 4, 1984, one month before her sister

Heba (mentioned in the video) passed away at the age of 9

"During our regular visits to Ghazzeh every weekend in 2012, I started to help my mother in providing food and shelter to refugee families. It didn't take long to notice that the plight of refugees in the village was too identical to our own strife in the exact same place, two decades earlier.

"Since Khalil's family technically lives with us, an unorthodox but very special friendship grew between me and him. My witnessing of his daily struggle in the beautiful locale of my childhood served as a wake up call for me. I felt that Khalil was re-living my past right in front of my eyes. And this time I could document it, not only for myself but for the whole world.

"Something was urging me to bring my camera and film the bond that was developing between me and Khalil. A bond built on sharing the war related traumas and many common personality traits. As in many other documentary projects, when I first started to film I didn't know what I was specifically after, but the pieces quickly started to fall in place."

Aya (3.5 years old) is a one of the Syrian refugees in Ghazzeh

All principal filming onTwice Upon a Time is now complete. To arrive to this point, Niam has used up her own resources and those of her family, friends and friends of friends. The urgency, intuitiveness and unfolding of the story on a day-to-day basis obliged her to focus on shooting the film rather than file applications for production support and/or waiting for financial backing from film funds or institutions (which is the classic route). The film team now need your support to raise a minimum of 35,000 USD for this project. These funds will cover part of the post production process and allow them to hire an editor, a sound designer and other artists and technicians to create a fine cut of the film. Once they have that fine cut, they can use it to apply for post production funds from regional and international film bodies.

Niam Itani has been campaigning and advocating for Twice Upon a Time, speaking on Al Jazeera about both her own history, Khalil's experiences and the project:

When I became aware of the project, via an introduction from film-maker Marian Evans, I had to find out more about this accomplished, skilled and impassioned artist, who studied for her BA in Communication Arts and a Masters Degree in Education from the Lebanese American University in Beirut, then pursued an MFA in Screenwriting from Hollins University in Virginia, USA. She made her first professional documentary in 2001 for a conference at university when she was an undergraduate. It was a short film entitled Ghareeb (Stranger). In 2005 Itani completed a second short documentary, Zakira Mubsira (A Foretold Memory). Between 2005 and 2010, she got the chance to expand her documentary skills while working at Al Jazeera Channel in Qatar as a Programs Producer. At Al Jazeera Itani worked as assistant producer on the critically acclaimed series Al Nakba and went on to make her first feature documentary, Rokam Al-Bared (Ruins of Al-Bared), a documentary about the destruction of a Palestinian refugee camp in North Lebanon. Her last short film, Super.Full. (2010), played at several film festivals including two Academy Award Qualifying festivals and the Venice Film Festival. Itani's feature narrative project entitled Shadow of a Man, is currently in pre-production and has been selected at multiple regional and international film venues. In January 2013 she co-founded placeless films, a film production company in Beirut, Lebanon. As part of placeless films, Itani also recently launched ScriptExperts, a specialized story & script service catering primarily to writers and filmmakers in the Middle east.

Niam Itani gave up some of her very precious time to tell me a little more about her history as a film-maker and her intentions as the creator of Twice Upon A Time. Below are selected quotes from her exclusive, honest and very powerful interview:

"The original idea was a personal documentary project, that I started to work on in 2010 – a journey to document my own memories as a child, some of which were very vivid and some missing. I was going to interview family members mainly and try to fill in the memory blanks. This idea took a major turn; however, when Syrian Refugees started coming into Lebanon in 2012. The uncanny similarity of circumstances forced me to shift my focus to the “story” unfolding right in front of me in the present. A present that will be embedded in the memories of this new generation of children refugees. Twice Upon a Time was born."

"[As explained above,] the film is the story of my friendship with Khalil, a Syrian boy who had to leave Syria with his family in 2012, and took refuge in Ghazzeh (the village where we took refuge in 1989) as well. On a second level, it is the story of Khalil’s family and their recent experience of refuge and the story of my family’s experience of refuge 23 years ago and how similar are the challenges that we used to go through as children. On a third level, this is a film about hope, memories, childhood, nostalgia, and the notion of home."

"The film seeks to bring many issues to the fore. Some of them are everyday issues of refugee life like finding shelter, food, health-care, schools and a good environment to live in whether on the level of infrastructure or on a social/interpersonal level, and potential work and education opportunities for family members. Important issues that I want the film to call attention to is the children mental and psychological health during refuge, protecting them from witnessing additional trauma, and encouraging them to have hope, to give them opportunities to play and to pursue their education and bring their dreams closer to reality. Another major issue is the lack of compassion for the incoming refugees among host societies – Lebanon in particular. We won’t be delivering any of these messages to our audience but want them to see for themselves."

"The sources of hope for the Syrian children today lie within us, those who were children during times marked by war, hatred and destruction; and yet we made it to become successful and active individuals in our society today. I’d like to think that I give hope to Khalil when he appreciates what I do today and realizes that I lived most of my childhood years in conditions similar to what he is living through now. Hope lies in sharing the lessons that we learned from our own war, and stressing the importance of education, understanding others and working towards a better future."

"The film is a very personal and intimate story. In the film, the main people who speak are Khalil (he talks to me), myself (through narration and through talking to him), his mother, and my mother. We are exploring ways of partnering with International NGOs to carry this message through a concerted campaign, to raise awareness among both host societies and refugees, particularly across Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and Syria. While this is the grand plan, we need more players and commitment to make this happen. On a more granular level, my sincere hope is that this film will touch people, irrespective of where they are, by sharing the message of understanding and compassion on a more individual human level."

"Mahatma Gandhi once said, 'If we are to teach real peace in this world, and if we are to carry on a real war against war, we shall have to begin with the children.' I have witnessed war as a child. Once it marks you, it will be very difficult to erase that mark. So the best thing to do is to utilize that effect and make it a tool for peace, love and understanding."

"I would like for viewers to put themselves into the shoes of the refugees, even if it is only for one day or one hour, and take into account the life that they must’ve been forced to leave behind. Their arrival as refugees in a new town or a new country is marked mostly by more hardship and challenges at the very basic level. I want this film to break many stereotypes, to spur people in societies that have refugees to accept them as fellows in humanity, to smile at them – if not for anything else. Ideally, I want people to help refugees wherever they are, to encourage them and support them in any way possible. We were there yesterday, they are here today, nobody knows who it could be tomorrow."

"I would like to bring a future of stability and safety to the children of Lebanon and Syria. One where bombs and bullets are considered dangerous accidents, not everyday life happenings. I want them to have the luxury to play and study without being forced to grow up so fast and carry more responsibilities and burdens than they are forced to do now."

Niam Itani with Khalil

The fundraising campaign for Twice Upon a Time is here. There are just five days left. If you like what you've read here, please support this vital project, which speaks to all those across innumerable countries, generations and cultures who have suffered displacement, conflict, societal breakdown and the fallout of violence and find themselves having to forge new lives as strangers - often traumatised, often mistrusted - in new places.

With gratitude to Niam Itani for granting me her time and wisdom. Quoted campaign text (c) Twice Upon A Time. Bidisha is a 2013 International Reporting Project Fellow reporting on global health and development.

UK premiere of film about the Connecticut Supermax prison that houses two extradited British nationals. With Amnesty International & Special Guests from the USA Solitary Watch.

Date of event : 16th May 2013, 6pm - 9pm
Location : Kings College, Room S-2.08, King’s Building, Strand, London WC2R 2LS
Event web page here
All are welcome. Tickets are free.
Click here for eventbrite details

Flagging up an upcoming special event entitled “Extradited to a future of torture: the reality of Solitary Confinement in the USA”, hosted by the International State Crime Initiative at King’s College. The event will feature the UK premiere of Worst of the Worst (link takes you to the trailer), a new 30 minute film made by Valarie Kaur with the Yale Visual Law Project. Valarie Kaur, is an award-winning filmmaker, civil rights advocate, and interfaith leader based in Connecticut who wanted to make this film on Supermax prisons after visiting Guantanamo Bay. She is the founder of Yale Visual Law which was launched in 2010 with two primary goals in mind: to create a cutting-edge pedagogical space where law students could be trained in the art of visual advocacy and to produce well-researched, professional documentary films on legal and policy issues. See the trailer online by clicking here. The film tour the UK with dates TBC in Scotland, Wales, North England in Summer 2013.

Worst of the Worst exposes the physically and psychologically abusive conditions of confinement in the Northern Correctional Institution in Somers, Connecticut, the prison that houses extradited British citizens Talha Ahsan and Babar Ahmad.

Talha Ahsan is an award-winning British muslim poet and translator. He was been detained over 6 years without trial, charge or prima facie evidence on the controversial 2003 US-UK Extradition treaty on allegations relating to association with an obsolete foreign jihad website from 1997-2002 covering Bosnia, Chechnya and Afghanistan. He was extradited to the USA on 5th October with his co-defendent Babar Ahmad and is now in solitary confinement in Connecticut at the Northern Correctional Institution. The trial will be in October 2013. Full details on the case and family campaign: www.freetalha.org

Babar Ahmad is Talha’s co-defendant. Before he was extradited, he was detained without trial for over 8 years, the longest period of detention without trial faced by any prisoner in British history. An e-petition to have his trial in the UK gathered over 149,000 signatures. See the site Free Babar Ahmad for more information.

Special guests from the USA James Ridgeway and Jean Casella, directors of Solitary Watch, and Amnesty International’s Tessa Murphy will discuss the issues in a human rights framework. James Ridgeway and media editor Jean Casella co-founded Solitary Watch in 2009, in order to "bring the widespread practice of solitary confinement out of the shadows and into the light of the public square." Their work has helped to fuel a growing national movement opposing the use of solitary in U.S. prisons, jails, juvenile facilities, and immigrant detention centers.

The Amnesty International report on Supermax prisons by speaker Tessa Murphy can be read here. In a 2012 statement of concern about Talha Ahsan & Babar Ahmad’s extradition, Amnesty International noted:

There is ample evidence in the USA and elsewhere that prolonged confinement to a cell with social isolation can cause serious physical and psychological harm. Concerns about such impact are heightened with regard to individuals, like some of those extradited, who have pre-existing medical conditions or mental disabilities. (Full statement available here).

Talha Ahsan’s new creative writing from Supermax prison will be read by his brother Hamja Ahsan. Writings from other prisoners in solitary confinement will be read by poet and playwright Avaes Mohammad.

Special guest James Ridgeway said :

Supermax prisons and solitary confinement units are America's domestic black sites, these are places where genuine torture takes place.

People in the UK should care about what happens in American supermax prisons, just as they care about what happens at Guantanamo... [because] British nationals are now being extradited to the U.S. to face decades of torture in solitary confinement.

Aseem Mehta, co-director of Worst of the Worst, said :

In making the film, we listened to all of the actors whose lives were touched by supermax - the inmates in solitary, the guards who report for duty each day, the policymakers and officials who oversee the facility, the architect whose legacy has become the prison, the family members and friends whose loved ones are inside, the lawyers and advocates who navigate the law that governs the prison's logic. We came away with the conclusion that the institution harms everyone who it touches, that everyone who enters Northern ultimately leaves damaged.

The event host is Dr. Ian Patel of International State Crime Intitiative. Dr. Patel is in the law department at King's College London. He specialises in criminal justice, criminal law, and international human rights. He is a fellow at the International State Crime Initiative. His recent article on Talha Ahsan case and prolonged solitary confinement was published in the New Statesman here.

Further resources:

25 minute Extradition Film now online about Talha Ahsan & Babar Ahmad
The Free Talha Ahsan Campaign www.freetalha.org and Facebook page and YouTube channel

I first met Iman Qureshi when she compered a night of lesbian and gay literature at the Vauxhall Tavern, where I was speaking at a panel event. Charismatic and witty, Iman not only talked on and talked off all the acts, she also wrote the evening up for Diva magazine (warning: contains a sunbleached image of me looking like an eight year old alien who was brought up by wolves in a forest). The previous day she'd been at Wormwood Scrubs prison, "talking to the offenders about being gay." As someone who does prison work let me just say: that's a tough gig.

Having worked around the media since moving to London after her postgrad a few years ago, Qureshi has now turned playwright. She will be premiering her first play, Speed, at the Tristan Bates Theatre in Covent Garden from 3rd - 7th December.

Produced by Kali Theatre, who develop thrilling new plays by women writers of a South Asian background - National Theatre, are you listening? Women's work is to be showcased, not aggressively ignored - Speed is part of the 2013 Talkback Festival, which is launching now. No surprise to discover that Speed combines the topicality, wit and political freshness of its author.

As Iman Qureshi describes it herself,

It's a bittersweet comedy set at a speed dating event, and deals with deeper issues of race, sexuality, class and gender.

Speed was born of my experience of leaving the safe, artificial confines of university and moving out into the real world. Suddenly all the theories I read about – class privilege, male privilege, white privilege, heterosexual privilege – became actual, lived struggles.

My naive bubble of belief that women can do anything men can do, deflated with every cat call, every tired cliche about lifting the veil and every statistic and experience which indicated the existence of a glass ceiling. It slowly became quite apparent that who you knew meant everything. What you knew meant very little. My hope that racial equality had been achieved was promptly destroyed when it was once suggested that my name was too unusual to sign off with when sending out emails to strangers.

Speed is a play of people railing against the cages that society constructs for them. Whether it’s an intelligent woman exhausted by a world which reduces her to an object, or a person who rejects the gender role they are assigned at birth, or someone whose heritage leaves deep scars upon their sense of self worth, the characters in Speed are united by the common struggle of identity in a world which loves to box people in.

Speed dating seemed to be the perfect mechanism to tell these stories. What is less reductive that five minutes to sell yourself to a prospective partner? Five minutes to decide whether to invest in the stranger sitting across from you when all you have is essentially a CV - age, job, hobbies, religion. Speed dating is also a microcosm of a world where love is just another commodity. Where finding a partner becomes yet another box to tick on our ‘To Do’ list of life. Where real human connections often lose out to the pursuit of contrived fairy tale endings.

I was also eager to give brown people the dignity of being represented without tired cliches or cultural stereotypes. Speed, I hope, is light years apart from narratives of extremism or arranged marriage. It is a play about Asians not thinking of themselves as Asian and of their place in modern Britain, but rather thinking of themselves as people.

Speed actors Goldy Notay and Tariq Jordan in rehearsal.

Speed will be on at the Tristan Bates Theatre in Covent Garden from 3rd - 7th December at 7.30pm.

On August 30th 2013 I receive the following very promising email:

From: averynicewoman@redcross.org.uk

Dear Bidisha,

Hope you are very well. Just to introduce myself, I work as part of the media and external relations team here at the British Red Cross and am currently managing various projects and activities that will mark the 150th anniversary of the founding of the Red Cross Movement.

We are hosting an event on the evening of the 29th of October entitled:

From Solferino to Syria - 150 years of Humanitarian Action
An event to mark the 150th anniversary of the Red Cross Red Crescent Movement

It is taking place on Tuesday the 29th of October 2013 at BAFTA, 195 Piccadilly, London, W1J 9LN. The event is due to start at 18.30, with a drinks reception and exhibition to follow a panel style debate and discussion. We will be framing the panel discussion and debate around the importance of neutrality and our emblems,using the current situation in Syria as a context for the discussion.

We would be delighted if you would consider appearing as part of the panel at the event, having written about the situation in Syria and having a great understanding of the humanitarian consequences of the crisis.

As well as the panel, we will also have a photography exhibition from Ibrahim Malla, a Syrian now working for the Red Cross, featuring shots he has taken within Syria and the surrounding areas. We are also hoping to get a Syrian Arab Red Crescent volunteer to speak as part of the event, to tell us about first hand the challenges they face on the ground.

Attached is a more in depth summary of the event for you to read through.

If you have any questions at all, please don't hesitate to drop me a line.

Best Wishes,
Very NiceWoman.

Very NiceWoman
PR Manager
Media and External Relations
British Red Cross
[Personal email address and phone number edited out]
44 Moorfields, London , EC2Y 9AL8:
Blogs | Twitter | YouTube | Facebook | Flickr

The document which is attached to that email reads as follows, stressed words made bold by me:

British Red Cross event marking 150 years of the Red Cross movement

Date: 29th October, evening.
Venue: 195 Piccadilly, the BAFTA building

Introduction

This year marks the 150th anniversary of the Red Cross Red Crescent Movement and we want to use this occasion as an opportunity here in the UK to engage with key stakeholders and the general public on issues that define both who we are and the work we do.

A high profile event allows us to recognise 150 years of the Red Cross Movement and is a great moment in time to celebrate and demonstrate pride and confidence in our work. It is also an opportunity to tell our story, develop greater awareness of who we are and position ourselves as unique within the aid sector through our guiding fundamental principles.

The Approach

Looking to the past year and the current news agenda, Syria has dominated. Often questions around the Movement’s neutrality in this crisis have been posed and we would like to use this event as a means of engaging key stakeholders on this issue. We hope through our panel debate to discuss the importance of neutrality and the emblem, what it means to us and how we can ensure that neutral access is granted so that we can continue to help those in Syria most in
need.

This discussion will be framed by the backdrop of the date the event is being held on – the 29th of October, which marks when the first national societies were recognised and the Red Cross was adopted as the emblem.

Audiences/ Invitees

Numbers of approx 150 – 175.
Other national societies and partner national societies
IFRC and ICRC.
Relevant media and journalists
Think tanks, partner organisations and relevant external stakeholders.
Major and high value giving donors.
Prospective donors.
Corporate partners, current and prospective.
MPs and relevant government

We are keen to invite our colleagues in Geneva as well as other national societies to share the event with them, as this is a movement wide anniversary and a theme that involves the whole of the Movement’s discussion and input.

In terms of external stakeholders such as think tanks, MPs and Government ministers – we are inviting them to develop a greater understanding of our work and the challenges that we face, with the aim that they can support our need for neutral access and put pressure on those that aren’t granting us this in current and future crisis.

The event provides an opportunity for corporate partners and major donors to engage with us on what we see as key issues and hear more about the work we are doing in Syria.

Format

• It will take place in the evening from 6pm onwards.
• The event will be opened by Sir Nick Young to set the context for the evening and introduce the thematic discussion, emphasising its relevance to the Movement, our history and our current work and challenges.
• The main event will comprise of an on stage panel debate and discussion
• The panel will consist of 4-5 knowledgable, well known and reputable guests.
• Questions from the audience to the panel guests and Sir Nick or other relevant BRC or Movement spokespeople, will be taken at the end of the discussion.
• This will be followed by a drinks reception for guests where the work of the photographer Ibrahim Malla, who has worked with us in Syria, will be showcased.
• There are also private rooms available, should any media interviews need to take place in a quiet space.

Running order

Draft timings:
Doors - 6pm
Drinks and refreshments on arrival in reception space - 6 to 6.30pm
Call for guests to take their seats - 6.30pm
Introduction from Sir Nick Young - 6. 35 to 6.45pm
Panel debate begins - 6.45 to 8.00pm
Post event reception - 8.00 to 9.00pm
Ends - 9.00pm

I respond on the same day, August 30th 2013, two months before the event:

Dear Very,

Hello - I would love to be a part of this panel. Thank you so much for the invite and count me in!

I will await further orders but am very happy to be asked,

Best

Bidisha

On September 2nd 2013 I receive a reply:

Hi Bidisha,

That's fantastic - we'd be delighted to have you as part of the panel, thanks so much!

If you can pencil the evening of the 29th October and I'll send through further briefings in the coming weeks.

Many thanks and any questions just let me know,

Very.

On October 9th 2013, 20 days before the event and more than five weeks after first being contacted, I receive an email featuring the following advert:

Hi Bidisha,

Hope you are well. Please see attached the most up to date invite for the event - in case you want to invite anyone as a guest yourself.

The final panel will consist of Terry Waite, Robert Mardini head of Ops in the Middle East for the ICRC, Simon Jenkins and yourself.

Dr Hugo Slim will be chairing. I'll send through the panel briefing in the next few days.

Do also let me know if you need me to book you a car to get you to the event?

Many thanks!

Very.

The attached, official invite is below:

There is an introduction from Sir Nick Young at 6.45pm. The panel is made up of me and Simon Jenkins, Robert Mardini, Hugo Slim and Terry Waite. Photographic work exhibited as part of the event is by Ibrahim Maila.

Men named on invite: 6 (5 white, 1 non)
Men present at event: 5, all white
Women: 1 (that's me, brown, double points)

As you see, the motto on the bottom right of the invite reads 150 years of humanitarian action

I reply the same day, October 9th:

Dear Very,

Hello and many thanks for your email. My main job is actually not with the Huffington Post, it's [I explain my International Reporting Project Fellowship].

The panel looks interesting. One query - if you include Nick Young then in the entire evening the speakers are 5 white men and 1 woman (me). Surely this is not quite right? In your last email to me the banner shows an image of two women looking aggrieved, with the tagline, 'A crisis can happen to anyone'; and your motto is 'Refusing to ignore people in crisis.' We all know, from the work we do, that women and children often bear the brunt of natural disasters, social breakdown, responsibility for all childcare, subjection to judgement and control, militarised violence (and the vast brunt of sexual violence and subsequent stigmatisation) and so on; and we also know that women are the majority of all charity workers, volunteers, fundraisers and aid workers; and indeed this panel event is organised by women.

Your event implies that women can be victims; women can work for free to help 'the cause'; and women can work hard behind the scenes. And we know that the Red Cross does incredible work all over the world, much of it in places where the majority skin colour is not white. Why do you have 5 white men and just 1 woman and 1 person of colour (combined in the same person - me) on this very high profile panel?

You are implying that women are not worth listening to and that the correct make-up of a celebration of global aid work should be that 5 out of 6 authoritative speakers are white men. I'm sure you know, too, from experience, that the audience will be dominated by brilliant, humanitarian, engaged, experienced and amazing women.

I am not enjoying writing this email as I so admire the work of the Red Cross and have been both keen on and honoured by this invitation from the very beginning. I have already covered this issue in The Guardian and as regards Amnesty International's television projects and comedy projects - I am shocked are [sic- and] surprised to see the Red Cross, which surely stands for humanity and for seeing all people as equal, is doing this.

Bidisha

On 11th October, after a thoughtful pause which I can sense across London, I receive the following:

Dear Bidisha,

Thank you for your email.

I am sorry to read the below [sic] - I hope you understand there was no intention in anyway to exclude women or have a male bias for this panel, nor was the panel intended to give out any wider messages or implications about inequality of women. Quite the opposite - we have been very much trying to achieve a balanced panel and guests in attendance.

Sir Nick Young is our Chief Exec - and so for an event like this it is appropriate for him to open. He is not sitting or chairing the panel - merely just welcoming everyone to the event.

In terms of the panel - we have made every effort to ensure that women from the sector and media were represented. Lyse Doucet from the BBC was very keen to chair the panel - but could not commit in case she had to go overseas for a report. Though if she is able to attend - we will have her as part of the panel, that is something we will only know in the days running up to the event. The same goes for Sarah Montague from the Today Programme.

We had also been speaking with Kristalina Georgieva, from ECHO to attend and although she very much wanted to - other commitments now means she is unable to join us and so is sending a deputy instead to attend as an audience member.

We are also liaising with the Syrian Arab Red Crescent to hopefully get volunteers over to speak of their experiences.

I'm sure you understand that the nature of these event often means that guests are confirmed last minute - and we do hope to have a wider ethnic and female representation on the day.

However, if you feel that you would rather not participate, then please let me know.

Many thanks,
Very.

I reply the same day:

Dear Very NiceWoman [whose name I'm now using in full],

Hello and many thanks for your email. The thing is, I have written many emails like my last, to my enormous regret and disappointment, and the result is always the same: the perpetrator mentions a few amazing women who might almost have been involved but by the caprices of the gods just somehow couldn't make it, or you haven't heard back, or it didn't work out with that one woman, and so on.

The upshot of all your efforts is that you have put together a formal invite headlining 5 white men and 1 woman.

As I mentioned above, the use of female Red Cross volunteers does not change the power dynamic of the event: women's hard labour has always been used up for free, while the authority - the introducing, the panel speaking, the definitive declaiming, the star spot on the bill/invite - is reserved for men.

I am cancelling my attendance at the Red Cross event, I will be publicising my reasons why, and your explanation, and I am enclosing a list of more than thirty-five relevant and brilliant women who would be exactly right for your panel.

This list took me no more than fifteen minutes to make. All the women combine a strong journalistic and speaking pedigree with knowledge and experience of international issues and passion for humanitarian work. If you want 3 speakers to make your panel equal, that would be less than 10% of my list.

Bidisha
London, 11th October 2013, 10.55am

The list of 37 women I sent to the woman from the Red Cross reads as follows:

Chitra Nagarajan, Homa Khaleeli, Alicia Izrahuddin, Soraya Chemaly, Kristin Aune, Lola Okolosie, Hannah Pool, Selma Dabbagh, Rachel Shabi, Michela Wrong, Frances Harrison, Victoria Brittain, Gareth Peirce, Zarghuna Kargar, Shereen El-Feki, Rahila Gupta, Heather McRobie, Rita Chakrabarti, Razia Iqbal, Rana Jawad, Catherine Mayer, Yvonne Roberts, Natasha Walter, Joan Smith, Joy Francis, Farah Nayeri, Caroline Moorehead, Petinah Gappah, Sonya Thomas, Susanna Tarbush, Rosie Garthwaite, Anna Blundy, Dina Matar, Bridget Kendall, Lindsey Hilsum, Helena Kennedy, Gillian Slovo

In the five minutes following me sending that last email to the Red Cross I thought of 10 further names:

Helen Bamber, Karma Nabulsi, Tazeen Ahmed, Joyce Adjekum, Kiri Kankhwende, Samira Sawlani, Monisha Rajesh, Asiya Islam, Anita Anand, Vera Baird

This brings the total up to 47 brilliant, worldly, humanitarian and knowledgeable women. I do hope that the next time the Red Cross puts on an event discussing its global humanitarian work, much of which is necessitated by the damage wrought by militarised, macho, misogynistic behaviour, it will not do so by headlining five white men and one non-white woman.

A couple of weeks ago I covered the importance of a well-trained, well-paid and well-respected human resources system in providing free universal healthcare globally. I analysed the challenges of doing so and examined some of the factors which can enable or inhibit good practice. Since then I’ve become aware of a new drive, flagged up by Health Poverty Action, which highlights the UK’s responsibility when it comes to global human resources in the field of health. It emphasises a developmental imbalance - with serious consequences for developing countries - created by the Western exploitation of global health worker labour.

Health Poverty Action has identified more than fifty countries, mainly in Africa and South Asia, which suffer from a “critical shortage of health personnel” while simultaneously carrying “a large part of the global burden of disease.” At the same time the increased necessity of long term care for ageing populations in European countries is creating strong demand for health workers, fuelling the migration of health workers to Europe from developing countries in today’s heavily globalised labour market.

Image of health worker in clinic in Tsumkwe in Namibia (c) Health Poverty Action

Health Poverty Action has been calling for the UK to “compensate developing countries for its role in the global health worker crisis.” There is a cached copy of the call here; I'm not sure what has happened to the plan to get supporters to write to UK MPs. The charity points to the shortage of health workers in developing countries and the UK's strong record of employing health workers who are originally from developing countries and migrate to the UK to work. HPA is not challenging people’s entitlement to move for work, to earn, to study and to create better lives, but instead seek simply to raise awareness of the consequences of the health worker shortage in developing countries. The responsibility for this must be on world governments engaged in large scale health infrastructure and planning. The shortage of health workers in developing countries results not only in poorer treatment there but in a variety of deficits which weaken the entire health system in the long term, from the under-staffing and under-maintenance of hospitals, clinics and rural health stations to poorer quality and less up to date training and education, the under-provision of medical equipment, the reduced chance of future investment when a future workforce cannot be relied upon and much more.

The charity adds,

It is estimated that 1 billion people [virtually all in developing countries] will never see a health worker, putting them at risk of dying from easily preventable diseases, from childbirth and basic health conditions.

The report Aid in Reverse challenges the UK government to play a conscientious and responsible role in ending the global health worker crisis, which Health Poverty Action labels a developing world “brain drain.” They suggest that in the UK the Departments of Health and International Development could work together on two complementary issues: first, treating the roots of the UK’s own shortage of health workers through better planning, training and education; second, giving something back to the developing countries whose health infrastructures are being weakened through lack – with severe ramifications for those nations’ own long term development – while they contribute so much to developed nations’ healthcare systems.

The challenge to developed nations who use the labour of talented health workers from developing countries to ensure their own citizens’ wellbeing is part of a pan-European initiative aiming to create a sustainable global health workforce. One of the main directives of the project is the implementation of a World Health Organisation Global Code of Practice on the International Recruitment of Health Personnel. The project’s tagline runs,

‘Healthworkers for all and all for health workers.’

Bidisha is a Fellow of the 2013 International Reporting Project, covering global health and development.

Photo by me

Southbank Centre’s proposed Festival Wing plans and redevelopment project is expected to quadruple the audience for festivals, events and exhibitions in and around the Queen Elizabeth Hall, Hayward Gallery and Purcell Room complex. Check out the plan:

Image (c) Southbank Centre

In addition to the 400,000 people each year who currently visit the Festival Wing complex for ticketed events and the 4 million annual who visit Royal Festival Hall, two million people will take part in an expanded free festival programme in the Festival Wing. These are the projections:

1.4 million visitors each year engaging in an expanded festival programme in the Queen Elizabeth Hall foyer, which is currently closed during the day, and the new Central Foyer space, the focal point for the Festival Wing and a spectacular display space for art installations, performances and exhibitions. The Central Foyer connects the Hayward Gallery, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Purcell Room and the BFI Southbank.
300,000 visitors enjoying the beautiful new roof gardens which triple the size of the current garden and will be open all year round, and performances in the new public square between the Royal Festival Hall and the Festival Wing.
50,000 children and young people engaging in an expanded free education programme in the Children’s House, Youth Village, Arts Education Studios and Big Backstage. Overall, 150,000 children and young people will benefit from our educational programmes each year.
250,000 visitors to new venues including the Glass Box, where visitors are brought close to the world’s great orchestras as they rehearse, experiment and perform; the History House, a dynamic exhibition space showcasing the histories of individuals, neighbourhoods and cultural movements that have transformed lives; and the Word Space, the first large-scale poetry and literature centre in London, including the relocated Poetry Library.

Charming commentary on walkway to Hayward Gallery, photo by me

It's very special. Photo by me

Jude Kelly, Artistic Director at Southbank Centre said:

We see this new development as a major part of our ambition to give away as much free culture as possible, having as profound an effect on arts centres as it had for museums and galleries. Because people know there is always something free going on, they are more likely to visit. We passionately believe the arts have the power to transform lives and must be available to all of us. That is why free art and culture are so important to everything that we do. Our summer festival programme is an increasing part of London life and with the Festival Wing we can dramatically expand our Winter programme, making full use of the fantastic new venues we will create. When Festival Wing is complete, people young and old, and from all backgrounds will be able to watch, learn, listen, engage, enjoy and be part of the largest cultural centre in the world, right in the heart of the greatest city in the world.

Existing skateboarding space, photo by me

The new plans include detailed design development of the proposed new skate space under Hungerford Bridge, to which Southbank Centre recently made a binding legal commitment ensuring it is permanently available to skateboarders.

The new skateable space under Hungerford Bridge is 120 metres from and more than 10% larger than the current undercroft. The design process was led by three members of the skateboard community with extensive experience in the practice and culture or skateboarding: lead architect Søren Nordal Enevoldsen, a skater and founder of SNE Architects, a practice based in Copenhagen, who is one of the world’s top architects for designing skateboarding and urban arts spaces; Rich Holland, a skater and architectural designer at Floda31, who has made many skateable installations and sculptures, including installations in the current undercroft; and Iain Borden, skater and Professor of Architecture and Urban Culture at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. In addition, expert advice was provided by the Focus Design Group, including specialists in skateboarding, BMXing, graffiti writing and parkour, and a series of three public workshops have recently taken place.

Projected design for new skateboarding space, open end 2014
Image (c) Southbank Centre

Like the existing skate space, the designs should not look like a conventional skatepark or skateplaza, and should also be flexible to allow for the possibility of events-based programming including skateboard events and dance performances, and for it to be used as an open public space for everyone. The design has been inspired by three of the most famous street skateboarding spots in the world today – Bercy in Paris, KulturForum in Berlin and MACBA in Barcelona – as well as the existing undercroft at Southbank Centre. This space will be open by the end of 2014.

The new space will be a larger and better facility than the existing space and the key design features include:

Numerous banks, ramps, ledges, steps and other features suited for contemporary street skateboarding and BMXing, including many more angled banks, fixed blocks and ledges than in the current undercroft.
Provision for skateboarders to add their own blocks and ledges, as in the undercroft
10 sets of steps and double-ledges with a total length of 77 metres, compared to just two short sets in the current undercroft;
Walls for street art like from a crap mid-90s Nike advert made by and for middle class white male hipsters including a very large area of more than 200m2
Bridge itself, treated with a special coating to allow painting straight on to the brickwork
New Parkour-attuned features including various plateaus, shelves and blocks (none in current undercroft). Life insurance, medical standby and local morgue not included
The modification of the pedestrian ramp, cutting away the existing lower structure to open up the space and allow sight-lines between the space and the riverside Queen’s Walk
Typical urban flagstone, stone and brick materials will be used, and high-quality granite will be introduced, which as a smooth yet tough and hard-wearing material is considered by many skateboarders to be the best surface for tricks (not in the existing space).
A top-lit, protective roof, providing weather protection to the area. Lighting, power and CCTV will help make the space safe and fully open and accessible.
A more open space inviting the public in, unlike the current undercroft which keeps the public behind railings.

I am writing this as a favour to the Southbank, who I love not just because I work there but also because I'm a longtime punter who's been going since I was in my teens. But I hate the skateboarders because they're a posh boys' club just like any other (know how I know? Because only posh boy skaters would go to the chuffing Southbank Centre of all places to do their skating and then arrogantly turn it into an entitled little performance for tourists to gape at on a Saturday afternoon; anyone else would just use the B&Q carpark or a concrete tube on a building site or a children's play area or the street or a shopping centre) and I have no doubt that if any cool girl skater, parkour enthusiast or dancer wanted in, she'd been sneered, leered or jeered out of there, or harassed, or frozen out, or simply hounded out quicker than you can say 'detached vertebrae caused by impact on concrete'.

Text (c) Southbank Centre. For more information and a selection of new images please contact Patricia O’Connor on patricia.oconnor@southbankcentre.co.uk

The eyes of the world are on Burmaas the fight continues to move towards democracy and away from militarism, division and violence. The incarceration and liberation of democracy and human rights leader Aung San Suu Kyi followed a longstanding and powerfully mythic template of gendered superstition, symbolic objectification and beatified mortification: female strength, female isolation, female suffering, female stoicism, female beauty, female purity, female fortitude, female spiritual endurance despite being stripped of everything, female forgiveness towards persecutors and a victory gained through surviving the longest under unjust mental and physical duress, not fighting the hardest in open and equal mutually granted combat. In the years that follow the unglamorous, quotidian labour of working towards democracy, development, integration and sustainability must be undergone and there are many problems to solve.

As one strand of their global activities Health Poverty Action have launched a campaign reaching out to thousands of struggling people living in rural, remote areas of Burma. They write,

In this forgotten area of Burma, conflict has forced 100,000 people - mostly women, children and the elderly - to flee their homes and live in displacement camps. They have no access to running water. There is not enough food. The freezing conditions and lack of toilets make them vulnerable to disease.

Nearly 50% of children under the age of 5 in the region will die, usually from easily treatable conditions including malaria or diarrhoea. Medical teams are working there to assist children and their families in providing vital basics: HPA has been helping feed 9,500 people, immunising 2,000 children, assisting over 500 women to give birth safely in the camp clinics and installing 350 toilets to improve sanitation. 36,000 people are currently living in the worst affected areas and money is needed to provide basic support there. Health Poverty Action stress that a £20 donation could immunise four children, provide two months’ food for a child living in a displacement camp, provide three quilts for families in mountainous areas which get very cold or provide two days’ training for camp volunteers looking after the whole community.

The charity ActionAid are also advocating and campaigning on behalf of Burma, which they are terming Myanmar. I call it Burmabecause Aung San Suu Kyi does. Although Burmahas more international links and exchanges than it did before, there are still very few outreach, aid and charity programs serving its poorest communities. ActionAid’s vision takes in the country as a whole and its focus is on broad-scale development and the establishment of basic services and infrastructures. In particular, they highlight the necessity of access to clean water, to education and to healthcare. They also point out, shockingly, that in Burma“one child in every 10 dies before the age of five.” A basal 10% infant mortality rate, rising to nearly 50% in displacement camps in remote regions, is extremely alarming.

Conditions were worsened by Cyclone Nargis in 2008, in response to which ActionAid mobilised to assist 200,000 people in Burma and established a national system providing staple food supplies, educational facilities and health stations to those most in need.

ActionAid also offer international supporters the chance to sponsor a child in Burma, in a scheme which first launched in 2012. They cite a Fellowship Programme which trains young Burmese volunteers (er – if they’re unpaid volunteers then where does the sponsorship money go? Labour should be paid – white ActionAid staffers in the UKget paid a salary after all) to work with remote communities, tackling the complex challenges that arise when trying to lift societies out of poverty. The work needed varies from establishing infrastructure like well-maintained road networks, agricultural training for sustainable farming practices and microfinance to empower people in starting up small scale enterprises.

ActionAid state,

We have worked with over 390 communities, supporting more than 150,000 of the most vulnerable and marginalised people [worldwide].

Although I know their intentions are good, I am very wary of child sponsorship after I once half completed an ActionAid Burmese child sponsorship application in a not-drunken-but-humanitarian stupor in the middle of the night.

As I filled out the first part of the form I felt increasingly self-critical about sponsoring another human being, like hiring some sort of pity pet, an individual I would never meet or speak to, just to make myself feel good. This person would never be positioned as any kind of equal but instead would be a distant and exotic source of self-congratulation, a faraway star lighting up my own ego, a collection of clichés about poverty and development, an object onto which various fantasies could be projected. Here are some subtextual justifications, arrogant self-compliments and snobby secret thoughts which underpin the actions of a child sponsorer (it’s just like being a horse whisperer except that you don’t even need to get close to the recipient to establish that special connection):

I am a good rich person of conscience helping a poor grateful person with no house/education/food/family/shoes with my few pounds a month.
Even if I’m not rich I feel rich because I’m so much richer than someone who’s got nothing that I can afford to give them a tiny little amount every single month and not even miss it.
I would like to pay them a few pounds but I wouldn’t want them living in my house or saying they want to visit. But I might want to go there and have a look one day out of curiosity.
I am happy to correspond by letter to maintain the romance of the thing but not by phone because that would be a massive imposition.
I am happy to pay my money but would not like to be troubled by any further demands as that would really be pushing it.
I will pay ten pounds a month but not twenty even though I spend sixty pounds a month on giant lattes at Costa and I just happily bought a £200 Zara winter coat made by exploited brown child labourers not unlike the kid I’m sponsoring. Yet somehow I’m sure it all balances out.
I have never been to the country and know absolutely nothing about the location where the child I’m sponsoring lives but I know the conditions are dreadful.
I didn’t care before but now I’ve received an endorsement from a likeable, sensible and unaggressive white person like Emma Thompson I’m willing to get on board. After all, she played Eleanor Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility so she's got a combination of feminine sensitivity and English brains I'm willing to listen to.
I can’t remember the exact name of the child I’m sponsoring as it’s very long and foreign but I’m sure she or he is just absolutely lovely. They’d better be.
It’s just like sponsoring a panda/goat/donkey/snake except that pandas etc don’t give you the extra satisfaction of writing you a letter to show you how grateful they are.

So, I had some ideological oppositions to it. I would much rather donate directly to projects for everyone and, let me make this pledge to ActionAid now, I would be very happy to travel to Burma to volunteer in the long term doing anything you want, from manual labour to teaching, and also report back and raise consciousness.

I junked the application midway, before I'd given the Internet my credit card details. A few days later I received a piece of paper from ActionAid. It was green and on the front was written in jaunty white lettering, ‘Child Message from Myanmar’, above a cartoon of a big-eyed, happily smiling yet barefoot kid in traditional Burmese dress, with, yup, a flower in her hair, holding a brightly coloured parasol and with not one but two extra parasols lying on the ground next to her. Part beanie baby, part Disney Princess, part prostituted child in brothel window forced to eye the punters beguilingly.

At the bottom of the leaflet it said, “The illustration above depicts a girl wearing traditional Myanmarcostume and carrying a traditional umbrella made in Pathein. Pathein umbrellas are a popular souvenir from Myanmar.” I love it when sexism and racism come together: it’s like acquisitive colonial nuclear fission. An infantilised female, used as an object to unthreateningly boil down and sell an exoticised region to a cultural tourist. The message is loud and clear: this is what you’ve bought. Burma: she’s cute, she's not pushy, she's definitely not angry, she’s innocent, she’s traditional (note the word being repeated twice in the leaflet sentence) and she’s designed to please. You don’t get an actual photograph of an actual human being because, North or West, South or East, whatever the language or culture or country, the objectified, sexualised, depersonalised, minimised, infantilised all-purpose female cartoon image is easier to use and provokes more sympathy than a real human female.

Coming next in the series:

Sponsor an Indian child and get a cartoon of a barefoot Indian girl in pastel kurta pyjamas or full-on wedding sari, bindi, khol, jewellery, red bangles, jasmine garland and ankle bells, next to a sacred cartoon cow.
Sponsor a Japanese child …okay, Japan really doesn’t need your money… and get an impeccably realised Manga geisha with detachable wig, whiteface panstick makeup, stiffly alluring smile and fully rigged sushi-printed kimono, standing either barefoot as mandatory or on wooden soled platform sandals.
Sponsor an Arab child and hit the jackpot: child in a veil, everyone, child in a veil, yet still somehow conventionally pretty around the eye area. Camels, pyramids, deserts and palm trees in the background. Angry brown male hordes (rebels, breakaway militia, idealistic students, army or government – or choose an assortment) to be Photoshopped out, or in, depending on your preferences.
Sponsor a Chinese child. Much like the Japanese child option but with a kiddy cheongsam and chopsticks in hair. Lit alluringly by paper lanterns hanging from a pagoda/noodle restaurant in the middle of a rice paddy in which Pokemon creatures and Moshi Monsters cavort. Or maybe that’s the Japanese option. Whatever, right?
Sponsor an African child (any southern African country will do) and get a very colourful cartoon! This time your child comes swathed in richly patterned kente cloth in the form of a head wrap, blouse and skirt, stretched-lobe beaded earrings, tribal lip plate, multi-stranded beaded neckpiece, rough hewn walking staff with feathers attached, ceremonial facial tattooing and extensive decorative scarring. Mud hut and red earth in background optional.

I opened the leaflet and there was a hand drawn picture inside:

On the back was a message from Mar Ku, the field worker looking after ActionAid’s project in the village of Yae Twin Kone. It was handwritten in careful English capitals.

Dear Supporter,

Warm greetings from Myanmar!

How are you? I hope you and your family are in good health. Now, I am writing about the update of your child Moo Keh Blute and his family.

He has drawn a picture for you. There are flag, ship, fish, tree, school, vase and flower. There are six family members. He has two brothers and one sister. He is the second one in his siblings. His father works in making bricks. He lives with his parents. His mom is a housewife.

Thank you for your kind and generous support to this child and his community. We will update more about your child in the next child message card.

And then, obviously, I felt dreadful.

“You mean,” said my mother, “you’re sponsoring a child, without paying anything?”

It seemed so, mum. It certainly seemed so.

What does this signify on the part of ActionAid? That when you think you are sponsoring an individual, you are not really doing so but instead having your money pooled and used generally for everyone? I am not against that. That when you provide your name and address via a web site, it will immediately be sent to a Burmese community project that has various already-done kids’ drawings on file to send to you to make you feel like they’re responding directly, when really no individual child has any idea who you are? That a field worker like Mar Ku, who no doubt has plenty of much more worthwhile work to do, has to go through the charade and labour of hand-writing updates to each supporter so that they feel they’re getting their interpersonal money’s worth? That when you think you’ll strike up a relationship of patronage with one kid - or, to put it less cynically, you will have the feeling of supporting one child's path in life - you will actually receive standard communications from a field worker writing automatically on their behalf? I am not against that, either. In fact I approve of what is really going on. I am critical, instead, of the illusion: that patronising, ignorant westerners think they are reaching out to one grateful Burmese child in a million and that a charity would encourage this problematic illusion when the reality of its work is much more credible and worthy of respect.

If any established charity is doing medium to long term outreach work in Burma, I would love to be involved and can be contacted at bidisha.contact@gmail.com

Bidisha is a 2013 Fellow of the International Reporting Project, covering global health and development.

All text and images below (c) The International Campaign to Stop Rape and Gender Violence in Conflict.

The women of Sudan are facing a crisis of sexual violence with no end in sight. This is the finding of a new report released today by The International Campaign to Stop Rape & Gender Violence in Conflict that documents the pervasiveness of sexual violence against women throughout the country and also highlights the important work being done by survivors and activists to combat the crisis.

Survivors Speak Out: Sexual Violence in Sudan details the rape, sexual slavery and other forms of sexual violence confronting the women of Sudan. The report exposes a humanitarian situation in which women reporting rape are routinely threatened, jailed and, in some cases, forced into exile. Survivors of sexual violence are actively denied access to justice and medical treatment, while activists fighting for their rights are regularly denounced and harassed.

“Women working at the local level to help survivors of sexual violence do so in secret—and desperately need the help of the international community,” says Walaa Salah, a peace and women’s rights activist based in Khartoum. Ms. Salah notes that, “perpetrators of sexual violence act with impunity as women are re-victimized by Sudan’s legal system.”

Women reporting sexual violence have the burden of proving rape and are often accused of adultery, an offense punishable by flogging and death by stoning if the woman is married. The government of Sudan outright denies the existence of sexual violence against women, and harasses women or organizations working to end the violence.

Survivors feel increasingly isolated. In 2009 many of the international organizations that delivered services to women were expelled from the country. Since then, survivors have effectively been cut off from the much-needed medical and psychological services. Some are able to turn to women-led grassroots organizations working discreetly behind-the-scenes to help women.

“Despite the dangers, women will not be silenced,” says Diana Sarosi of the Nobel Women’s Initiative. Survivors and women’s rights activists in Sudan work tirelessly to reform discriminatory laws. According to Ms. Sarosi, “survivors of sexual violence throughout Sudan are banding together and reaching beyond their borders in order to create a safer environment for women.”

The report calls upon the international community to offer more direct support to women’s rights activists combating sexual violence in Sudan. In order to offer survivors and activists the support they need, the scale of the invisible crisis must be determined through more research and data collection. The report also calls for greater access to areas of conflict, including a country visit by the U.N. Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women, Rashida Manjoo. Finally, the report demands that the International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant against President Omar Al-Bashir be enforced so that he can stand trial for his war crimes against the people of Darfur.

The International Campaign to Stop Rape & Gender Violence in Conflict is led by the Nobel Peace Laureates of the Nobel Women’s Initiative and an Advisory Committee comprised of 25 organizations working at the international, regional and community levels to stop rape. Since its launch in May 2012, more than 700 organizations from around the world have joined. The Campaign demands urgent and bold political leadership to prevent rape in conflict, to protect civilians and rape survivors, and calls for justice for all—including effective prosecution of those responsible.

The Nobel Women’s Initiative uses the prestige of the Nobel Peace Prize and courageous women Pace Laureates to magnify the power and visibility of women working in countries around the world for peace, justice and equality.

This is The Story Ritual, an introductory essay about short fiction which I contributed to Edgeways, a new anthology from Flight Press. Full project details are here. I also contributed a new short story, The Comforting of Children, to the anthology, as part of my return to fiction.

The Story Ritual

Everyone knows the story ritual. It begins with ‘Once upon a time’ and it ends, in childhood at least, with ‘And they all lived happily ever after.’ As we get older the stories become more complex, more shadowy and circumspect. Perhaps yearning for some consolation we turn back to the fairytales, fables and adventure stories we knew from childhood, only to realise that even they contain striking ambiguities and subversions. Bluebeard: wife killer. The wolf in Little Red Riding Hood: murderer preying on the elderly, human eater, sartorial necrophiliac and cross-dresser, child groomer. The prince in Cinderella: foot fetishist. The prince in Rapunzel: hair fetishist. The prince in Sleeping Beauty: rapist. Snow White: female masochist who finds happiness as seven men’s domestic drudge.

Even these stories, with their generic, Disney-colonised contemporary names, arise from rituals of recounting adventures, creation myths and folklore which long predate written culture and are strongly echoed by countless narratives all over the world. They are full of death, betrayal, selfishness, desire, heroism, defiance, friendship, sadness, enmity: the stuff of life. The stories embody near-universal hopes and fears, provide escape, give warning, reprove or reward certain desires. They reflect both the time of their telling (and retelling) and the universality of our own impulses.

The story ritual isn’t about whether the narrative is committed to paper or to the air and the ears. It’s not even about literature, as such. Journalists and news crews pursue emerging stories, fashion spreads in high-end magazines are referred to as stories, private investigators try to get to the bottom of a story and witnesses of crimes give their stories to the police. Con artists have their stories too, often very elaborate ones. Part of the ritual is that you follow a story, if it’s a good one, all the way to the end. The mark of a rich tale, whether it’s epigrammatic or epic, is that you want to know what happens next. And if that ending is weak, the reader feels not irritated but actually betrayed. We are galled and disappointed, as if we were set up in good faith and then sold a dud.

I’m always intrigued by nurseries and prep schools that have a soft-furnished, quiet, special story corner, as if stories deserve their own place as well as their own time in which to flourish. Similarly, the ritual of parents reading their kids to sleep, which always struck me as incredibly narcissistic on the part of the adults, is a memory apparently cherished by many. My own childhood story ritual was listening to a tape of The Snow Queen every night as I attempted to drift off. The sound of the queen flying up to the children’s attic window, tapping on the glass and keening their names in a ghostly voice is one of my most harrowing, vivid recollections. It was only fiction, but fictions provoke real reactions.

Later, I was given a wonderful hardback book of hundreds of stories, each exactly a page long. One was about a young woman with waist length blonde hair. She was so tired of being teased (or as we say these days, sexually harassed) about it that she tried to dye it black in the kitchen sink. It turned green and she was mocked even more badly when she went to school the next day. I never quite worked out the moral of the story. Either it was ‘just be yourself’ or ‘just be sexy’.

Readers have rituals: they read before bed or on a long afternoon, in the chair they always use, or on the commute to work. They do or don’t fold pages, break spines, underline things or read the last paragraph first. Writers also have rituals, some more OCD than others. I know some who kiss their copies of Pablo Neruda or George Eliot when beginning a new book, put a lucky charm on their desk or, getting to the trickier end of common behavioural disorders, make sure they’ve washed their hands three times before they touch the computer keys. Others go to their study with just the right cup of tea and just the right biscuit.

We are hoping that if we get the ritual right, it’ll repay us in words, in inspiration, in insight and good judgement. All of us are striving to write that one, perfect, satisfying thing. Every word has to count, every shift has to happen at the right moment. It goes deep yet seems light; it’s a structure of iron hung with silk. I once met a writer whose story had won a competition I co-judged. She hadn’t expected to win. ‘I just wrote it in a week,’ she said, exhilarated and disbelieving. I reeled back. It takes me months.

The story ritual is so powerful that we carry its psychological imprint with us for the rest of our lives, even to the point of naivety. We assume that our lives will have a coherent narrative balance, moral shape, emotional form. We go into our thirties and forties believing that things will always work out in the end, with a natural karmic equilibrium; that we will fall in love, perhaps even at first sight like so many fictional characters; that we deserve or are justified in pursuing adventure; that any event or act can be explained and therefore understood; that any pathology or feeling can somehow be decoded. We assume that this mysterious thing called karma will eventually repay the balance of evil and good. We believe that every story we live through must have an appropriate end, which we call ‘closure’, and that we can bring this about as though we are protagonists. It is from stories, nothing more, nothing less, that we believe that everything that has begun will be ended, and will end somehow fittingly. This does not happen often in reality, yet still we keep the faith.

I had to come to faith sooner or later. Underlying all world religions is an indissoluble trinity of faith, story and ritual. The great books of nearly all the world’s major religious belief systems are really just short story collections presented either as emblematic myths or as faithful accounts of true events. And all the rituals of the world’s religions are built on those stories, and everything we believe is built not on the evidence of our own eyes but on stories. Angels and other supernatural harbingers do not exist. The Garden of Eden did not exist. A man cannot walk on water. A god can’t have ten arms or four arms or a monkey’s head or an elephant’s head. The part-animal sentinels and judges of the Egyptian underworld do not exist. But it doesn’t matter. We read the stories, we heed them and we invest them with meaning, regardless of whether they are true or possible. We extrapolate their conclusions, build them into morals and use them to structure the laws, beliefs, values and customs of societies of billions of people. We use the stories to justify both our violence and our generosity, our exploitation and our humanity, our abusiveness and our self-sacrifice. We perform various rituals we invented, inspired by the stories, and have done so for thousands of years. That is the power of the story ritual: to underpin, explain and motivate human society for as long as we have existed.

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