Dadua Slain. Is Banditry on the Wane?

The only known picture of Dadua

I did a short interview for NPR yesterday on the last stand of the feared bandit Dadua in Uttar Pradesh last week. Special forces surrounded the dacoits position and lobbed grenades at him and ten of his armed colleagues.

I'm interested in doing some more research on banditry in India. Unlike the various revolutionary movements across South Asia, there is something romantic--if unnerving--about the dozen or royal dacoits who have spend decades resisting the government. Unlike the Naxals men like Dadua, Veerapam, and Man Singh didn't have grandiose political aims, but were unwilling to live by conventional morality. It almost that the most powerful dacoits in India are the inheritors of India's long dead feudal traditions.

Dadua survived in the ravines and jungles of Uttar Pradesh for so long because he fashioned himself as a patron of the rural downtrodden. He got the vote out for political parties, and paid dowry money for families who could not afford to get their daughters married off. He was half-magnanimous monarch and half cold blooded killer with over 150 murder cases attributed to him by the police.

Man Singh, the notorious bandit king who was gunned down in a similar manner by the police in the 1950's, has risen to god like status in Madya Pradesh. Today a score of temples in rural areas include his bust along with the pantheon of Hindu gods. Even 60 years after his death local people see him as a benefactor.

Yet the central government seems to be stepping up operations against bandits and I wonder if soon there won't be any place for these sorts of figured in India's IT future.

I'd like to find out more about Dadua. Perhaps I'll take a trip up to UP and visit the temple he consecrated.

Listen to the NPR story here: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12255575

Hello, Indian Helicopter

I really can't tell you how many times I've walked down a crowded tourist streets and a rickshaw driver pulls up next to me in a bumble-bee colored taxi pod and says "Hello, Indian Helicopter"? It's a pretty lame way to entice some to visit an emporium, after the burping and sputtering rickshaws are nothing like helicopter rides. But it must work on some people. Indeed one rickshaw-wallah in Mumbai has taken the sales pitch to the next level and modded his shaw for maximum tourist bilking.

I wonder if I would jump in if this guy pulled up next to me. I'd like to think that I would.

Link via Calamur on Flickr and Neatorama

When Media Conglomerates Steal

Front page of WIRED News

Yesterday I had a story published on WIRED News about a group of calligraphers in Chennai who are writing the last handwritten newspaper in the world. This morning I wanted to see how people were reacting to the story and checked Google to see how many people had linked to it. The story seemed to be well received. However, that was not all that I found. It turned out that so many people liked it that ABC News decided to publish the story for themselves and throw their copywrite logo underneath it to say they owned it. They retitled it, edited it lightly and threw a photo from Reuters on top of it. They even used my byline to make it look like they commissioned the piece.

The story on ABC's website

Now for those of you not steeped in media politics, freelance writers like myself make our living by selling stories to media outlets and we get paid in return for our work. We are usually allowed to resell a story after a certain amount of time to make a little more money for our labor. Still, most freelance writers barely scrape together a living, but do it out of love for the job. So when I found out that one of the largest media conglomerates in the world had decided to publish my writing without seeking my permission first (or offering to buy it) I sent a note out to them to see what was going on.

This is just one of many ways that big media companies try to take advantage of the people who actually produce the content that they depend on. ABC doesn't have a correspondent in Chennai, it wouldn't be practical for them to afford one, so when a story comes up that they want to print, it would seem fair that they would at least have the decency to support the people who write.

No response from them yet. More to come.

UPDATE: Following a reader's comment I've added a Digg button below if you want to spread the word about what ABC is up to.

Last Calligraphers Goes Live on WIRED

The age of Urdu calligraphy isn't over. It's just close to it. For the last couple months I've been fascinated by a small hand written newspaper here in Chennai and have written several posts about it. It even helped inspire my tattoo. I planned a feature story on the paper however after being kicked around the Smithsonian for a few months the story got killed and a somewhat shrunken version of it is now on the front door of WIRED News. Still the story is great and the photos make you wonder how this small paper continues to chug forward in the modern world.

See the WIRED News story here. And the gallery here.

In other news, I just got back from a whirlwind tour of West Bengal on a story about the legacies of colonial medicine in India. This will be a magazine feature in the coming months and you will hear more about it soon.