Brian Conley's News & Notes

I’m living in Goa now, as you already know if you read my earlier post about my unfortunate accident in Calangute. I live about 3 kilometers from the Video Volunteers office, where I’m coordinating a new Community Journalism program for them this year. I don’t have a car yet, and I may be too much of a hazard to myself and fellow drivers on a scooter. So given that, I walk to work, and nearly end up walking home as well every day.

Motorbikes are a common method of travel for many in Goa, so its possible I’ll decide to trade up from my trusty Keens to something a little more Bladerunner meets MadMax.

Public, consider yourself warned.

Part of what makes the commute so great is the scenery. For the time being the weather is always delightful, not too hot in the morning and pleasantly cool in the evenings.

If I didn’t walk I’d have to pay through the nose for taxis, even without my recent history with the Goan Taxi Mafia, I’d not be likely to take that option. I’ve recently heard that the public bus may be an option, but then I’d get dropped at the beach and have to walk away from the beach in order to get to the office. I’d likely never make it.

Further, I like to walk, and since I’ve thus far spent most of everyday at work hunched over my laptop, clicking and typing away, I’m sure I could use the exercise. So far the commute has tended to be fairly uneventful, aside from the occasional need to dodge a speeding tour bus, or evade the droppings of wayward cattle. I hope it stays that way, although by the time the monsoons arrive, I’ll hopefully have purchased a car and found another way to get my daily exercise!

I’ve added a couple more photos below, to provide a broader feel for what the scenery is like here:

These locations are two interesting landmarks on the walk between Arpora and Baga Bridge, which is exactly where Video Volunteers is located.

The image to the left shows a large store that sells Buddhist art objects and furniture. They rarely, if ever, appear to have customers, and its been posited by some of my colleagues that it may be a front.

To the right you’ll see the entrance to Mackie’s Saturday Nite Bazaar, the epicenter of social life in Arpora/Baga on a Saturday night. Those in the know prefer to head to the Anjuna Saturday night market, I’ve not made it there yet.

Last, but not least, on the road between Nagowa and Baga is the often seen, Temple Elephant, making an appearance for the tourists, offering photos in exchange for a small donation. You’ll note the elephant on the left, I’m on the right, once again on my way to work.

I saw an interesting discussion on Twitter this morning(late night their time, remember I’m in India at GMT+5.5). A variety of #mediaagitators were discussing the term “voiceless.”

Here is a selection:

digidem “Tweets and Blogs: Social Media as a Voice for the Voiceless” @emjacobi invited to give talk at American University on community empowerment

SamGregory @DigiDem Is anyone truly voiceless? Or they are just being ignored if/when they use their voice?

audaciaray .@lksriv @SamGregory @DigiDem I really hate it when people are referred to as “voiceless” – so patronizing and disempowering

maymaym Yes! We’re not voiceless—they’re not listening. ♺ @audaciaray: Hate it when ppl are referred to as “voiceless.” Patronizing & disempowering.

emjacobi @audaciaray @lksriv @samgregory – i’ve been off twitter all day, but i agree completely that no one is “voiceless” & said so.

I fully understand that there is a distinction between being voiceless and being unheard or ignored. I am concerned that for the privileged, and lets be clear, anyone who has direct access to Twitter counts as “privileged” in my book, it can be problematic or worrisome to spend too much time discussing the semantics of our relationship to power and privilege.

Perhaps we can work toward an effective and meaningful definition of those we’d like to be collaborating with?

The primary issue I see with the term “voiceless” is that by defining someone you’d like to collaborate with as disempowered you have immediately created a power divide. You cannot help but stratify your relationship if you define your relationship as one based on their need and your support.

At Small World News we have primarily worked to see how we can use our privilege to support others to magnify their voice, to strengthen their broadcast, and, at our core, provide the skills and support that is asked for, and then get out of the way.

However, I’ve tried hard not to fetishize semantics such that I might exaggerate the capabilities of those with the least access. It can be equally difficult to help those who have never spoken for themselves to know what they have to say. How do we describe someone who does not know what they’d like to say, as a result of generations of disempowerment?

Today I am in India working on creating a loose network of Community Producers, social activists trained to be journalists who will help shed light on the disparate issues facing their communities that have, until now, never been accessible to the commons, to a wider community beyond a small geographic area. It is likely they have as much a need to be heard as to understand what they might say and how it might benefit their local community.

The willingness to listen and ability to have patience to a fault may be more important than trying to provide the tools for others to access the digital communications space.

Do you think the term “voiceless” is at all helpful?

Can we work together toward a more meaningful definition of those who lack access to the media commons, to the digital commons, who have never been listened to, and reflexively may at first appear to be “voiceless?”

Today President Clinton, in his infinite wisdom, told us that we should look to Rwanda as an example of a successful post-crisis recovery for a state in the developing world.

Mr. Clinton can perhaps be excused for missing this Digital Journal article about his friend Paul Kagame’s involvement in repression of independent political parties leading up to Rwanda’s next election. But surely he’s heard of his own party’s condemnation of Rwanda’s proposed anti-gay legislation?

Is that the Rwandan example he thinks Haiti should be following?

Or perhaps he’s cynically thinking only of Rwanda’s recent success supporting American corporate interests, despite the fact that  these very same agricultural projects, rather than feeding Rwandans, might ensure many continue to go hungry.

Which is quite appropriate, when you consider very similar policies, implemented in Haiti, are at the center of the destruction of Haiti’s rice production. Given the role of NAFTA in destruction of Haiti’s economy, and the role President Clinton played in pushing NAFTA, one has to wonder what words passed privately between the two men before Mr. Clinton ensured Mr. Aristide’s reinstatement as President of Haiti in October 1994.

If this isn’t enough evidence that perhaps Rwanda is not a model for Haiti so much as Haiti was a model for Rwanda which has now become a model for Haiti, we could investigate the mention of Indonesia as another success story, but how will Mr. Clinton’s Christian supporters feel about that suggestion?

PEOPLE. Right now we have a possible new solution to war in Afghanistan, a dramatic rise of the drone war in Pakistan, a collapsing state in Yemen, an opposition leader under assault in Sri Lanka, an election in Sudan that is on the verge of being delayed, a massive rewrite of the common understanding of the “genocide” in Darfur, an explosive situation in Haiti and the threat of a new war in the Middle East. All of these are bits of information I garnered from Twitter over the last few days.

But lets be clear, none of those are going to “change everything.” It will be this fab new gadget and a speech by Mr. Jobs that is going to mark a great turning point in modern history.

Its impossible to imagine that just before Ferdinand was assassinated in 1914 the world would have been so obsessed with a gadget that would be accessible only to the wealthiest 1% of the world population that the international media would be more interested in telling the story of such a gadget than publishing the latest gossip about imperial machinations of various world powers.

Perhaps the issue is that we have to low a barrier to access and to high a barrier toward making a living. Shock and Awe marketing and the ability to one up the breaking news of one’s competitor takes precedence over in-depth, contextualized, and investigative reporting.

I’d be more excited about the latest gadgets and gizmos if more was being done to improve the lives of the bottom 10-90%. Imagine if Apple was combining a strategy to engage in social good and increasing access to the digital communications space with their massively hyped presentation of a shiny new object that quite possibly is contributing to war in the Congo and ongiong human rights or labor violations at factories around the developing world.

It’s not all doom and gloom though, part of my point is that there *IS* a wide array of information out there, but it’s being drowned in a sea of marketing, PR, and hype. The question I’d like to see answered is not only why are so many people interested in hype, but how can those of us interested in improving the visibility of important international affairs be more successful? How can we be more effective at drawing connections between the various conflicts around the world and the policies of developed nations, whether they be political, social, financial, or otherwise?

I will probably try to wake early enough to watch the SoU, though let me tell you, I don’t expect much revolutionary world-changing new perspective to be unveiled then either.

I’m sure most everyone from the “developed world” or the so-called “West” who might be reading this has had some experience with a car accident, whether someone backing into them, or running another car off the road(i won’t tell you which one I am…).  Here in India things are resolved a bit differently—->

Yes, that is a tire driving over my foot. That was the first moment I noticed the red Swift taxi outside of the collective din on the street outside Norm’s in Calangute. I was pissed. This <expletive-deleted> had just driven into me in his hurry to get through the crowded traffic, driven over me, and then continued on.

Had I known more about Indian traffic courtesy I would have swallowed my indignance and driven on immediately, and quickly. Instead I chased him, as he was in fact pulling off to the side of the road just ahead. With proper first-world indignance I started yelling at him immediately for driving like an ass and crashing into me while I was stopped on the side of the road.

He came at me like a thug and immediately turned off the ignition on my scooter, I went for the key and he pulled it out. Remembering everything I’ve learned the last 5 years around the world, I held on to that key and wouldn’t let go until I’d pried it back out of his hand.

“Why you drive like this? You pay me!”

At this point I was really shocked, and I also began to realize I had certainly gotten in a bit over my head. At the same time I was sure this guy was at fault.

Moments later I was surrounded by a dozen indian guys who apparently had nothing better to do than stand around and watch the spectacle. Looking back I wonder if this wasn’t some kind of reversed social roles post-colonial justice-letting, but in the moment I was only thinking about Robert Fisk’s story of being beaten by a mob in Afghanistan and having to fight his way out.

After I had the keys, the guy grabbed my headphones cord and I told him to let go, the cord snapped, just at the point of the connection to the iPhone in my pocket. I’m lucky to have a wonderful mother-in-law who saw fit to gift me a pair of Bose Mobile-on-Ears, which have a detachable headphone-to-player cord, otherwise I’d quite likely be out a pair of much-too-expensive headphones.

This guy wouldn’t budge. He just kept saying “You give me money!”

Of course at the moment I had maybe 230 rupees, given that I had been on my way to work when a colleague lent me the scooter to try and get a feel for it. Little did I know my first day on a scooter would turn into my first accident on a scooter.

What you have to understand is that all these guys surrounding me are there for the spectacle, and they may or may not know what the situation is. Either way, they’re on the other guys side, not yours.

Moments later I was crashing back into this crowd of guys as the taxi-thug pushed me hard in the chest. I wasn’t having any of it, and apparently he wasn’t either. He wanted me to go to “my hotel” and come back with the money. It was about this time he grabbed the headphones around my neck, which are worth roughly 10 times the amount of money he was trying to extort.

It seemed that he was willing to agree to go with me to “my hotel” which, as I told him repeatedly, didn’t exist because I am working for an Indian trust organization, and my *house* is quite a ways off in Arpora, toward Nagowa. So what you’ll notice if you ever get into a similar situation is that its never just one guy you’ll have to deal with, it’s one guy, plus his “posse.”

So taxi thug got into the car, another guy was driving, and a third guy climbed into the back seat. Apparently none of them spoke passable English, which, in my experience thus far, is a bit strange for Goa. I got in the back, but wouldn’t close the door, I expected if I’ve agreed to go with them on a ride to get the money this guy wanted, he should do me the decency of giving my stuff back.

To recap, at this point he had my headphones, the headphones cable, oh and my sunglasses which he picked up after pushing me down into the scooter. They really have a discourteous way of dealing with people they don’t like/consider fools, however I can’t help wondering if they didn’t learn it from their British and Portuguese colonial forebears…

So, misunderstanding what I wanted apparently, they reshuffled the car and taxi-thug climbed in back with me. Apparently in colloquial Konkani the appropriate reaction at this point, to someone making a reasonable request that you disagree with, is a punch in the head.

Fortunately I was still wearing the scooter helmet. Also fortunately, when taxi-thug jumped out of the car and came around, apparently ready to give me a full-on beating, the crowd came to my aid and talked him down.

To resolve this rather rambling story, let’s just say, I paid the man. Which is lucky for me, as I was informed later by my Indian colleagues, had I been capable of calling the police(I didn’t yet have an operational mobile), I would have only ended up paying “The Man,” and I’d have had to pay him 5 times taxi-thug’s going rate, as a pay-off for violating the “driving without a license” ordinance.

Which is how I learned that in India, if a taxi driver crashes into you, you drive away, very fast, and hope he can’t catch you.

PS. Thanks to Keen’s awesome sandals, my foot survived.

PPS. Any endorsement of a product is mine alone, and not related to sponsorship of any kind.