About Me
born Amit Aishwarya Jogi to Ajit Jogi and (Dr.) Renu Jogi neé Solomon on 7th August 1977 at Dallas Tx.; naturalized as an Indian national on 1st July 2004; arrested by the Central Bureau of Investigation on 1st July 2005; incarcerated at the Raipur Central Jail before being enlarged on bail on 3rd May 2006; bail cancelled on 30th April 2007; acquitted of all charges on 31st May 2007; studied at the Lawrence School, Lovedale (Tamil Nadu); Daly College, Indore; Modern School, St Stephen's College (BA Hons. History) and JNU (MA Politics and International Studies), Delhi; now enrolled for a Bachelor of Laws (LLB) course at the SKTD Law College, Raipur University; 1 sister (deceased). To know more about me, visit my blog: My Blog! 
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Interests
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Bibliophile, Author, Epicurean, Cooking For Friends, Walking in the Woods, Painting, Pounding on the Piano
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Favorite Music
Symphony No. 9 (Beethoven), Tannhauser (Wagner), Requiem (Mozart), Piano Concerto No. 1 (Tchaikovsky), Lata Mangeshkar, Abida Parveen, U2, Pink Floyd, Patsy Cline, Robbie Williams, Maria Callas, Tango, Bob Dylan, Simon and Garfunkel, Jim Reeves, Frank Sinatra, Johnny Cash, Khayyam, Gulzar-RD Burman, Arturo Toscanini, Celine Dion, Piano Concerto No. 2 (Rachmaninoff), The Blue Danube Waltz (Strauss), Toccata and Fugue in D Minor (Bach), Bjork, Herbert Von Karajan, Madame Butterfly (Puccini), La Nozzi di Figaro (Mozart), Yehudi Menuhin, Henry Mancini, Planets (Holst), Kajararé, Cavalleria Rusticana (Mascagni), Chhattisgarhi Folk (karma, suva, panthi-dadariya, chandaini-gonda, gam'mat-nacha, pandwani, Lakshman Masturia)
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Favorite Music Video
Return to Innocence (Enigma)
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Favorite Movies
Casablanca, Roman Holiday, Fanny Och Alexander (Ingmar Bergman), 8 1/2 (Fellini), Talk to Her (Pédro Almodovar), Le Petit Soldat (Jean Luc Godard), Throne of Blood (Akira Kurosawa), Annie Hall (Woody Allen), Le charme discret de la bourgeoisie (Bunuel), A Matter of Taste (B. Rapp), The Lion in Winter (Goldman), Three Colors Trilogy (Krzysztof Kieslowski), Citizen Kane (Orson Welles), It Happened One Night (Frank Capra), Some Like it Hot (Marilyn Monroe), Monty Python and the Meaning of Life, पङोसन (Mahmood), जाने भी दो यारों (Kundan Shah), लगे रहो मुन्ना भाई (Rajkumar Hirani)
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Favorite TV Shows
I Love Lucy
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Favorite Books
The Holy Bible, Mahabharata (incl. Bhagwad), Illiad, Quran-i-sharif, Discovery of India, The Story of My Experiments with Truth, Working a Democratic Constitution (Austin), Kabir-granthavali, Shakespeare (the characterization of Falstaff in Henry IV, Macbeth, Richard III, Iago in Othello), The Name of the Rose, Foucault's Pendulum, The Island of the Day Before (Umberto Eco), One Hundred Years of Solitude, Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez), Midnight's Children, Shame (Rushdie), The Golden Gate (V Seth), My Name is Red (Orhan Pamuk), Wilt, Porter House Blues (Tom Sharpe), Germs, Guns, Steel (Jarod Diamond), Noam Chomsky- Edward Said, Gravity's Rainbow (Tom Pychon), Harold Bloom, Urdu poetry (in Roman/Devanagari script), An Idea of India (Khilnani), A la recherché du temps perdu (Proust), Michel Foucault (all), Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (Shirer), Tarikh-i-Firozshahi (Barni), Gilmour's biographies of Curzon and Kipling, Diplomacy (Kissinger), The Proudest Day (Read-Fisher), Friedrich von Hayek, Hobbes
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Favorite Quote
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more: it is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing. William Shakespeare, Macbeth V.v
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hi5 Games
Amit Aishwarya hasn't played any games recently.
Journal
Typically, much of the past month has been spent in mostly pointless finger pointing: rather than pondering over WHAT factors are responsible for our defeat in Chhattisgarh, we- as a Party- are more focused on WHO is to blame. Such an approach can only lead to inquisitorial witch-hunting, which would do harm than good to our prospects in the forthcoming Lok Sabha elections. In my opinion, there are five factors (vis-à-vis our wipeout in Bastar, sidelining of Satnamis, alliance with the NCP, delay in ticket-distribution & the ABJ Policy):
A. WIPEOUT IN BASTAR
First and foremost, is our total wipeout in the tribal region of Bastar, where we lost 11 of the 12 seats. There are two reasons for this. One, the illogical choice of party candidates. To illustrate, consider the following four cases:
(1) A lady has been persistently losing every single election she contested since 1990: in 2 of 4, she forfeited her deposit. Less than four years ago (2004), her real brother failed to win the Sarpanch election; her daughter-in-law forfeited her deposit in the Janpad election. Yet she is given the party ticket for the fifth consecutive time against an aspirant who lost his last election by about 1000 votes, and remained fairly active as the voice of the Opposition since.
(2) There are three blocks in a constituency: Bhanpuri, Mardepar & Narayanpur. Bhanpuri & Mardepar have more than 1,30,000 voters; Narayanpur, which is 150 kilometers from these two blocks & lies in the heart of thickly-forested Naxalite territory, has 13,000 voters. A person from Narayanpur is given the ticket.
(3) A chronic party-shifter recently returns to the party by way of BSP & BJP after having lost every single election he contested in the interregnum. His Delhi-based daughter, who can’t speak a word of the local dialect, is allotted the party ticket.
(4) In a seat where there are only about 500 Jain voters, we give a ticket to a Jaini knowing that the BJP candidate is also from this community.
It is woefully obvious that in each of these four instances, we inexplicably made choices that defy not only logic but also that rarest of things, common sense. The same is true for at least two other constituencies, Kondagaon & Keshkal, where party tickets were given to relatively unknown persons over more established figures.
While this reason accounts for much of North Bastar (Jagdalpur, Narayanpur & Kanker districts), the second reason explains our defeat in the South (Dantewada & Bijapur districts): it is the state-sponsored Salwa Judum (SJ) movement, which has led to the forceful uprooting of over 70000 tribals from about 600 villages, and their displacement to about 26 makeshift roadside ‘camps’, where they continue to live in inhuman conditions, as well as the merciless slaughter of thousands of innocent tribals. Writing on July 8 2006, I had offered the following observation about SJ:
“Further sustenance of SJ is based on its own three-fold logic, and has nothing to do with tribal-interests:
• POLITICAL: Come election-time, and there will be no polling stations in evacuated villages. Instead they will be set-up well within the guarded perimeter of these 6-7 concentration camps. (This number eventually increased to 26) And it doesn't take a psephologist to predict the electoral outcome under such ‘free, fair and impartial’ conditions. Does it? Think about it. Had elections been ‘conducted’ in Auschwitz, wouldn’t the National Socialists (Nazis) have swept the polls? Thankfully, unlike Der Fuhrer- who didn’t consider his refugees worthy of the vote- this regime views the tribals as- and only as- a votebank. And SJ, as it happens, is the surest way to encash this votebank en block.
• CULTURAL: Concentration of vast tribal populations in the controlled environment of camps provides an easy assembly-line for the Sangh troika and its affiliates to work overtime in order to factory-produce indoctrinated specimens: a people repeatedly told that they are worshipping ‘false’ gods, eating ‘polluted’ foods, following ‘promiscuous’ practices and ‘anachronistic’ customs; and systematically made to feel ashamed about their (former) ‘primitive and barbaric’ way of life; thus slowly but surely falling in line with the (pseudo) ‘hindutva’ pogrom of the RSS. Much more than the geopolitical displacement, it is this sense of ‘cultural displacement’, which will come from living in camps, that worries me. Henceforth, camp-inmates will be permanently scarred by a false sense of ‘inferiority-complex’, and adapted to a type of doggish existence where they will be always told what to do and feel and think. Free will has been the greatest casualty.
• ECONOMIC: As with all tribal-targeted government schemes, SJ camps have given birth to their own peculiar industry. Tens of millions of rupees spent daily by the state-exchequer to provide housing, food, health-care and schooling to the over 70,000 tribals is being siphoned off by a clique of middlemen, in cohorts with their bureaucratic and political patrons. Put simply, it is not in their interest to wind-up such an enormously lucrative & profitable business.”
Now, I can’t help feeling a bit like Cassandra, doomed to see the future and yet unable to do anything about it. The fact is that the BJP has, thanks to SJ, gained a foothold in South Bastar for the first time since elections commenced in 1952: in a region where the contest had always been between Communists (CPI) and Congress, they have won two out of three seats outright and we’ve managed to defeat them in the third by a measly margin of 190 votes. Needless to say, the BJP votes all came from SJ camps, which together accounted for more than 70% polling in these three seats. The Congress simply avoided defining its position on the issue, perhaps hoping to have the cake & eat it too: its CLP leader headed this movement, which had the full backing of the state as well as the Union governments, whereas another faction, led by my father & having the unequivocal support of an overwhelming majority of the party’s elected representatives in the state, opposed it for the reasons I’ve mentioned above. In my opinion, this procrastinated ambiguity has cost us dearly.
I believe that the battle for Bastar goes deeper than elections; it is a battle for the very Soul of Tribal India. While the BJP & its affiliates- its extensive network of Saraswati Shishu Mandirs, Ekal Vidyalayas & Vanvasi Kalyan Ashrams- work fulltime in even the remotest areas of Bastar with the unequivocal backing of the state administration, we’ve nothing, absolutely nothing, to counter this. In a sense, we’ve left the field open to them to do as they will. It is therefore surprising that despite all this, we’re still in the game: we did, after all, lose 3 of these 12 seats by very narrow margins: Antagarh by 90 votes (mainly because of rigging done during counting), Bastar by 1200 votes and Kondagaon by 2770 votes. To me, it is clear that people in these 3 constituencies did want change, but to put it simply, we failed to offer them viable alternatives.
More significantly, the most crucial lesson from our second consecutive loss of Bastar is the absolute necessity of taking the fight into the educational and cultural fields, where the BJP-RSS-VHP troika and its affiliates have a field day. If this is not done soon, we might end up losing Bastar- and perhaps, all of tribal India- to the communal forces of Hate forever.
B. SIDELINING OF SATNAMIS
The second most significant factor- and one which the current Inquisitorial polemic tends of ignore- is the rising influence of the BSP rising influence of the BSP due to the total sidelining of the Satnami (SC) community within the party even though they had strongly stood by the Congress in 2003’s Assembly elections (thus accounting for a decline in BSP’s voteshare from from 5.65% in 1998 to 4.4% in 2003; even more significantly, it had lost its deposit in 46 of the 54 seats from where it contested): it is indeed shocking that not one person from this community numbering more than 25,00,000 found representation at the block, district or state levels of the party organization during the past five years.
To read more, visit http://amitjogi.blogspot.com/2009/01/chhattisgarh-2008-5-why-we-lost.html
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