Lest yesterday's post make First World readers swoon overhastily over India's democracy, two prominent Indian human rights activists of the People's Union for Civil Liberties were jailed for life.
Their crime: carrying a small amount of cash, as well as what the authorities term "Maoist" literature. Not for any actions, weapons or explosives, mind you -- just thoughts.
One of the most singular contradictions of the industrializing world is that its citizens live the burden of the colonial past on the most personal level imaginable. The British colonial regime which plundered India for centuries is gone, but India's postcolonial elites all too frequently act with the same disdain and arrogance as their British predecessors.
Incidentally, this contradiction is what makes the contemporary media productions of the industrializing world so rich, multifaceted and dynamic. The greatest artists of these nations have to answer not just to the toils of the present, but the travails of the past, and this gives their best work the sort of deep, world-shaking energy missing from most First World media productions (with the signal and honorable exception of today's videogame culture, which is transnational through and through). They are battling not just for justice in the present, but for the dignity of the past.
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