It’s very hard to take a serious issue and convey it in a fun manner without losing some of the seriousness. The makers of Wallace & Gromit have done it astoundingly well. Their new campaign for Leonard Cheshire Disability called Creature Discomforts, which you can view here, manages to be sincere and cute at the same time, without slipping over into sentimentality or trivialising the issues. This is probably largely due to the fact that the voices behind the characters are people with real disabilities.
The biggest messages are about stigma and access. Like Kevin Gillespie who gives voice to Brian the Bull Terrier says:
“We went to have a look at a pub that we were considering visiting on a group day out which calls itself disabled friendly, but when we got there we found there was gravel outside which made it difficult to move our wheelchairs around, an extremely sharp right turn to get into the entrance, and then a step to get to the bar! That’s not what I’d call disabled friendly.”
“It’s things like this that make you feel excluded as there are certain places I’d like to go to but can’t because of access problems”.
These barriers, however, don’t stop Kevin getting out and about locally. “It’s really important for me to actually live in, and feel part of the community. I must admit, I have lived here for five years and I cannot recall anyone looking at me as if to say ‘What planet has he come from?’ Everyone has looked at me as they do able bodied people and forgotten about the chair”.
Here is the Guardian’s opinion on the campaign and here is a video on the making of it.
One of the things that struck me is that the campaign talks about access to bars, restaurants, places like that. In developing countries, we are so far behind on this curve that it doesn’t even bear scrutiny. To begin with, there is little data on disability. When poverty and social marginalisation are added to the cesspool, disabled people are discriminated against in many more ways.It is telling that in my social circle, I seldom meet disabled people. It is a quiet but systematic exclusion that takes place so much below the surface that most of us are not even aware of it.
A recent World Bank report found that disability seriously affects economic prospects in India and “physically challenged children are four to five times less likely to be in school than Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes children.” In my own experience, organizations will usually not hire a disabled person. In fact, India’s disabled employment rate seems to be falling. Deprived of economic opportunity (and even before that, education), disabled people seldom earn enough to gain access to more than the basic necessities. You don’t see them in bars or nightclubs, rarely at restaurants or malls. So people forget about the issues of disabled people because it’s easy to.
It’s a vicious cycle and I think schools hold a large piece of the puzzle. If schools sponsored a few classes that were disabled-friendly, it would help bring them into the mainstream besides inculcating awareness from a young age among the other kids, who in turn would hopefully grow up to be less discriminatory as adults. Parents would also possibly understand disabled people better if they were friends with their children, came home, stayed for tea. It would go a long way towards driving up our collective awareness and empathy up a notch. What do you think?
I started my Monday morning with this video on continued human rights violations in China. Not a very cheery beginning to the week, but I definitely recommend a watch.
China is gearing up for the 2008 Olympic Games which are to be hosted in Beijing. There is something far more important than sport being played out in this arena, however. The world now has its eye on China’s human rights standards and is watching to see whether it will make good on its promise to improve its dismal human rights records. In December 2006, the Chinese government also unveiled new temporary regulations to give accredited foreign journalists more freedom in the run-up to and during the Games.
According to the Human Rights Watch overview, the country “remains a one-party state that does not hold national elections, has no independent judiciary, leads the world in executions, aggressively censors the Internet, bans independent trade unions, and represses minorities such as Tibetans, Uighurs, and Mongolians.”
Things have not improved much despite the promises according to this report. In the run-up to the Games, China is keen to present its best face to the world and freedom of expression is being heavily curtailed. Recently, Reporters Without Borders activists rallied in front of the Olympic museum in Lausanne even as the Chinese Communist Party’s 17th congress opened to protest continued inaction on the human rights agenda.
“For the past several weeks an icy wind has blown through freedom of expression in China. This with less than 10 months to go before the opening of the Olympic Games. How can the IOC and its ethical commission remain silent before such a heavy toll of violations of freedom of expression?” it asked.
“More than 30 foreign journalists have been arrested and prevented from working since the start of the year. No fewer than one thousand discussion forums and websites have been closed since July. And a score of dissidents have been imprisoned for expressing themselves freely,” Reporters Without Borders said.
For some background information on the human rights situation in China, read RWB’s Annual Report 2007 which details some of the atrocities committed by Hu Jintao’s government in the name of “harmonious society”.
Hu Jintao’s voiced rage against “hostile forces”, whom he accused of fomenting a “coloured revolution” backed by the United States and led by human rights activists and liberal journalists, when he spoke to an audience of ministers, ambassadors and party provincial officials in August 2006. As preparations got under way for the next Communist Party Congress in October 2007, public security arrested at least 12 journalists and placed scores more under surveillance. This crackdown has also extended to lawyers. In March they were banned by China’s Association of Lawyers from speaking to foreign journalists about “masses incidents”, concerning groups such as the unemployed and the peasants. In September, Chinese judges had the same ban on speaking to the press slapped on them.
The Chinese government monitors every bit of information passing in and out of the country. Which is why news reports on China usually focus on its booming economic prospects and speak nothing of the poverty, corruption and inhuman prison conditions. but here is Amnesty International’s lowdown on the rights violations plaguing China’s 1.3 billion people.
Torture and ill-treatment remained widespread. Common methods included kicking, beating, electric shocks, suspension by the arms, shackling in painful positions, cigarette burns, and sleep and food deprivation. In November a senior official admitted that at least 30 wrongful convictions handed down each year resulted from the use of torture, with the true number likely being higher.
I don’t know about you but I’m going to find it hard to muster too much enthusiasm about the Games this time.
Here is an interesting competition aimed at encouraging global changemakers. An initiative by BBC World and Newsweek, World Challenge 2007 will reward projects and businesses that not only make a profit, but also put something back into the community. The 12 finalists have been chosen and programs profiling the finalists are on at BBC World through this month and the next and you can vote for them on the website. Reality TV with a difference.
Expectedly, most of the finalists are from developing countries. Where there is necessity, there is invention. Sri Lanka, Nepal, Brazil and Vietnam are some of the countries in the running. I think Sri Lanka’s sweet wrappers receycled into fashion accessories and Nepal’s artificial limbs made from waste material are particularly ingenious. Also, sanitary napkins made out of indigenous material in Uganda strike a chord because it’s heart wrenching to think of how many women across the world are denied access to basic hygiene. A commenter on the message board provides perspective:
I live and work here and recently visited a school where Dr. Musaazi had provided MakaPads to the school. For the first time, the girls were having discussions about menstruation and the girls outnumbered the boys in enrollment. I didn’t realize that many girls drop out of school because they simply cannot afford pads and the banana leaves that they use are too unreliable to be out in public. Menstruation in many countries is the end of education and the beginning of too early motherhood. I have visited the place where the pads are made. It’s an amazing story and a wonderful support to young woman in Uganda.
Even if the comment itself is rigged (a possibility that cannot be dismissed in any competition), I think it points yet again to the tremendous effects that basic hygiene and sanitation has on human lives. Another article I read once pointed out how similarly lack of water for washing and bathing contributes to a drop in social standing because cleanliness is inextricably linked with dignity. We see this around us all the time. People who look unclean or smell bad are routinely denied admission into restaurants, salons, shops, supermarkets — all public spaces — and it leads to a systematic rejection, a ‘keeping out’, of a whole section of people. The wealthier patrons of these places seldom stop to think, while turning up their nose or casting distasteful glances, that people seldom choose to be unclean. Most often, they have no options and no access to facilities. The feeling of personal degradation is compounded by lack of social dignity. Expensive water, lack of public toilets, inadequate drainage systems, expensive sanitary napkins — all contribute towards this humiliation.
Coming back to the competition itself, last year’s winner was a paper-making firm in Sri Lanka called ecoMaximus which uses different types of wastes to produce high quality products.
The firm set up shop in Kegalle, Sri Lanka, in 1997, not far from an elephant orphanage. In Sri Lanka there is competition between elephants and a growing human population for land. The proximity of elephants was a boon for the papermakers; for as they soon discovered elephant dung is an ideal raw material for paper products they began a range of elephant-dung paper to draw attention to the plight of the Sri Lankan elephant. This unusual product has found buyers within Sri Lanka and throughout the world.
It would be interesting to see how the winners are doing a year later. How the competition helps them and how their efforts grow or are sustained. I wonder if BBC World has done any follow-up stories on this. The biggest challenge for many development projects is sustainability so it would be a logical next step for the program to look at this aspect.
A few days back, Turkey voted the AK Party back into power in elections that many say is a resounding slap on the face of the Turkish military. According to news reports in the BBC and other western media, the AKP has been accused of having an Islamist agenda by some who feel that Turkey is going backwards in some ways and are concerned about the increasing number of women who are wearing chadors on the streets.
What everyone will be watching for in the next few months is how this new power dynamic actually affects Turkey’s secularism, which has always been guarded rather jealously by its military. The AKP has denied that it has an Islamist agenda. Given its interest in seeing Turkey become part of the European Union, it is possible that they will continue to be understated about such an agenda, even it exists.
What this columnist, who is also associate professor of political science and director of Middle East Studies at Drury University, points out is that things are not as two-dimensional as the western media makes them out to be. It is not a battle between Islamist and secular forces because the different parties involved in Turkish politics and their policies are far more complex than that. Meanwhile, this blogger talks about why she supports AKP:
I do support the AK Party because they have, in fact, shown their determination to do something good for the country. It matters not if a little money disappeared; the majority went into the country coffers versus the pockets of politicians.
International media’s inability (unwillingness?) to go beyond the obvious and the hype to delve into the underlying layers presents a skewed picture to the world. Unfortunately, this leads to many of us having half-baked notions about many events — and in some cases — countries.
Another instance of this is when India recently elected its first woman president. Newspapers around the world celebrated this as a momentous victory for womankind and took it as a sign of changing times for women in, what has traditionally been, a very patriarchal society.
Scratch the surface and a different story emerges. The president holds little more than a ceremonial post. India has already had an extremely powerful woman prime minister — Indira Gandhi — in the past. Pratibha Patil, the new president, has a dubious record of fraud and misguided loyalties and she “talks to spirits”! Needless to say, many in India are skeptical (if not outright disappointed) at having her as president and this includes the feminists.
It’s sad, and little frightening, to think of how little we know and understand about other countries sometimes. And how little the media helps. On a more upbeat note though, thank god for blogs!
