Finding Soho

There is a trend in western politics that is growing by the day. There appears to be this belief that because something - some topic, some issue - has been re s olved by 'consensus', any questioning of it should be treated as wrong, unacceptable and incorrect. I witnessed this recently when a woman who had experienced adversity was mocked, sneered at and humiliated on television by the 'consensus' crowd for voicing an opinion (about her experience) that somehow made the consensus look bad. So now it's alright to demean someone who is already experiencing adversity because her experience, her loss makes your opinion look bad? It's remarkable that those who are so incredibly elitist as to demean everyday battlers on television are considered champions of the downtrodden. Words and gestures apparently matter more than your actual treatment of someone in adversity. 

In India, when it comes to discussions on the rights of sexual minorities amongst politicians and political parties, there is a glaring double standard that comes into play. It’s one that may baffle western observers but fits perfectly with the binary construction underpinning how many Indians view gender and sexuality. What’s happened over the past couple of years is that while gay rights have taken a few giant leaps backwards, transgender rights have taken a few giant leaps forwards. There are two parallel phenomena at work here: increasing support across the political spectrum for special laws to protect the rights of transgender people, and continuing reluctance to decriminalise homosexuality by repealing the infamous Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code. Sec 377 is a colonial-era statute that prohibits “sex against the order of nature”. As I explain later in this article, India has vacillated on Sec 377 in ways that have deeply disappointed those who had hoped for ...

Time after time, ABC reporter Stephen McDonell produces the most intrepid reports from China. He speaks perfect Chinese. He seeks out interviewees who are confident, persuasive and often daring. Some are environmental activists, some are journalists, some are anti-corruption crusaders, and a vast number of them are ordinary citizens who have grievances against the state. He films anti-eviction demonstrations, protests against police violence and even protests by separatists. How does he do it? While many of the people he encounters are reluctant to speak on camera, an impressive number are openly critical and speak with startling confidence. The most impressive was an elderly lady at an anti-land grab and anti-eviction demonstration who, when told by a policeman to keep quiet ("You are making us lose face in front of the foreigner"), started reciting her name, address and phone number. She declared her contact details in front of the bevy of policemen who surrounded her. She...

Bern ie Sanders and Donald Trump have taken the US pre sidential primaries by storm. Let's reflect on some aspects of their emergence on to the American political stage and the 'establishment's' responses to this.      B y all reports, Sanders appeals to the young, liberal and college-educated demogra phic, and it is this group t hat is vocally supporting him on social media and at his enorm ously well-attended rallies at various towns across 'liberal ' America , particularly th ose with liberal arts colleges. Sanders' app eal is based on his recogni tion of the econ omic challen g es that young Americans face today, and their declining faith in both the state and the market . They are often in preca rious jobs or are under-employed, while being burde ned with huge education deb ts . They are often st e eped in discourses about social in equality and economic in equality, and the two are seen as being inextricably inter linked. Essentially, S ander...

The other day this jokey name just popped into my head - Vlad the Impala. I thought to myself, if I ever found myself in the company of an impala and had the opportunity to name it (for conversational purposes of course), I would call it Vlad the Impala. (Yeah, I know.) So I was amused and wondered what else would become of our fictional impala character - maybe an impala who is a fearsome, dark, mysterious and frightening character who goes around doing unspeakable things to the other animals in this imaginary sketch; maybe an impala who transforms into a carnivorous beast at night and wreaks unimaginable havoc amongst his impala friends... Something nice and pleasant like that. So I was amused at myself and my brain's capacity to come up with ridiculous things like that in moments of dullness or during (weird) flights of fancy. Is it weird to think random thoughts like this once in a while? Perhaps not. I must confess that I often have what can only be described as random...

On Kindness , psychoanalyst Adam Phillips and historian Barbara Taylor’s new book, delves into that most fundamental of human attributes – kindness – and raises some important questions about how we understand and embody kindness today. Charting the centrality of kindness in human history, literature and social thought, Phillips and Taylor ask why kindness has become a sign of weakness in our modern times, a cause for anxiety in an age preoccupied with success. Kindness, or the lack of it, occupies a complex place in our lives today. “There is nothing we feel more consistently deprived of than kindness,” they say. They argue that “the unkindness of others has become our contemporary complaint” and “nothing outrages us more than people being unkind to us”. And yet, we “are never as kind as we want to be”. Phillips and Taylor make the case that while we are often afraid of “living according to our sympathies” (“kindness is the saboteur of the successful life”), the kind l...

A bad habit Once I have finished reading an interesting, moving, insightful or informative book, I often search for conversations, reviews or commentary on the work. This happens almost involuntarily, without my intending to do so, and is a bad habit that refuses to die. Unfortunately for me, what I often find, especially if the book happens to touch on a politically sensitive topic (or, actually, not even so, as you will see shortly), is hypermodern intellectual nihilism of the kind that makes you despair of the future of writing and thinking.   Unfair critics In Act 2 of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot , the listless protagonists Vladimir and Estragon decide to kill time by hurling insults at one another. The jokey tirade continues for a while with the two men hurling the choicest abuses at each other until they reach climax with the biggest insult they can muster: “critic!” This article is about recent encounters with frustratingly bad reviews of books...

Channel 9's 60 Minutes special on the survivors of the Sydney Siege was distressing but necessary. Difficult as it would have been for the survivors to recount every moment of that nightmare, they did it with maturity, insight and fortitude. The documentary did justice to their harrowing tale. Their warmth, intelligence and courage shone through. Their bravery in the face of danger, their compassion for one another and their ability to remain composed under pressure struck me as extraordinary. What was most heartening and powerful was the fact that they completely understood and empathised with each other's predicaments. Confronted with the sheer impossibility of knowing what would unfold as that horrific situation progressed, those who saw an opportunity to escape had no alternative but to grab it. It was an impossible situation. As one of the survivors who remained trapped till the very end of the siege said, it was impossible not to feel gratitude for the good fortune of th...