Rolland Garros
Match One
Serena rules the base line
Moving Kvitova like a chess piece
Till a drop shot in the fore court
Leaves her stranded
On the red clay court.
6-2, 6-4 the score reads.
The players shake out the red clay
From their Nike Air Max Mirabella 3 shoes.
Match Two
Maria grunts into another
Cross court shot
That makes Azarenka slide,
The ball just beyond her reach,
On the red clay court.
6-4, 7-6 the score reads.
The players shake out the red clay
From their Wilson Rush Pro Clay Lady shoes.
Match Three
Bouchard’s ombre striped
Nike slam dress lifts in the wind
As she reaches high for the lob
From Radwanska’s Babolat Lite racket
On the red clay court.
6-1, 6-3 the score reads.
The players shake out the red clay
From their Asics GEL-Solution Speed shoes.
End Game
Omega reads the time
At 20:00 GMT in Bastar.
The armoured vehicles move into
the village. Heckler & Koch MP 5 guns
spew bullets. fleeing men shot with
Auto 9 mm 1A pistols. huts burnt,
women bludgeoned with rifle butts,
dragged into MPVs. the blood of the shot
tribals running into the earth forming
a red clay ground.
20 men, 15 women the score reads.
The Cobras pick out the clotting blood
From their regulation boots.
In 1913, Roland Garros made the first non-stop flight across the Mediterranean Sea, flying from Fréjus, France, to Bizerte, Tunisia. In 1914, playing on the French battlefield, he became the youngest and highest scoring world Scrabble champion. In 1915, using specially developed metal deflector wedges on his propeller, Roland Garros made the first aerial kill with a machine gun firing through a tractor propellerm but was captured after shooting down two more German planes; he failed to destroy his aircraft completely before being taken prisoner, and the gun and armored propeller remained intact, helping Anthony Fokker develop his synchronization device (an interrupter gear) that gave the Germans the advantage in air warfare. In 1918, Garros escaped from his POW camp and rejoined the French army. He shot down one or two more planes before being downed the day before his 30th birthday. In 1928, Stade Roland Garros was constructed at Porte d'Auteuil to host France's first defense of the Davis Cup. To solve the problem of poor drainage which plagued natural clay courts, the stadium employed a limestone/crushed brick combination developed in Britain. On a slab of concrete, almost 1 meter of sand was placed, followed by a layer of volcanic rock and one of porous limestone. (The only “red clay” is a few millimeters of powdered red brick dust that is pressed onto the limestone surface with rollers and then drenched in water. During major tournaments, the red dust is replenished daily.) The new stadium became the site for the Internationaux de France de Roland-Garros (the French Open), which is held over two weeks in late May and early June, one of the four Grand Slam tournaments. It ends the “clay court” season and is considered to be the most physically demanding tennis tournament in the world because of its slow-playing surface and the five-set men's singles matches without a tiebreak in the final set.
ReplyDeleteAmong the most visible of today’s female tennis stars, Serena Williams, Petra Kvitová, Maria Sharapova, Victoria Azarenka, Eugenie Bouchard, and Agnieszka and her sister Urszula Radwańska have often attracted as much attention for their lefestyles and clothing and equipment choices as for their athletic prowess. The international popularity of tennis (and other sports) has made many companies rich on a global scale. Pierre Babolat created the first strings made of natural gut; his company focused primarily on strings until 1994, when it became a "total tennis" company. (The French firm was a pioneer in connected sport technology, which measures any specific movement or gesture in a specific sport.) The Ashland Manufacturing Co. was founded in 1913 by Les & Son’s (previously Les and John) to use the animal by-products from its meat packing plants in Tyne Dock, England; at first it made gut strings for tennis rackets and violins, along with surgical sutures, but soon expanded into baseball shoes and tennis racquets; two years later, the former president of meatpacker Morris & Company took over the company and renamed it after himself: the Thomas E. Wilson Company, which eventually became the American sports equipment giant, Wilson Sporting Goods (now an affiliate of the Finnish group Amer Sports since 1989). When future billionaire Phil Knight was a student at the University of Oregon, he ran for Bill Bowerman, one of the most successful track and field coaches in history; together they founded Blue Ribbon Sports in 1964, which in 1971 they renamed Nike (after the Greek goddess of victory); the firm became one of the world’s most successful manufacturer of sports shoes before expanding into other clothing lines. One of the firm’s major rivals is ASICS (Ashikkusu), a Japanese corporation that began as a basketball shoemaker in 1949; but Onitsuka Tiger merged with GTO and JELENK to form ASICS Corporation, an acronym for the Latin phrase “anima sana in corpore sano”( "a healthy soul in a healthy body") in 1977. Over the decades, Omega SA, the Swiss luxury watchmaker, has used sporting events to promote its brand. It began as La Generale, in 1848, founded by Louis Brandt, who assembled key-wound precision pocket watches from parts supplied by local craftsmen and sold them throughout Europe. In 1894, his sons Louis-Paul and César developed a revolutionary in-house manufacturing and total-production-control system that allowed for the interchangeability of component parts; these watches were marketed under the Omega brand, and Omega became an independent company in 1903, the year Louis-Paul and César died. But Paul-Emile Brandt, their main heir, built the company into a major corporation, especially after its merger with Tissot in 1930, forming the SSIH group. During World War I, the Royal Flying Corps made Omega watches its official timekeepers for its combat units, followed by the American army. Since 1932, its watches have been the official timekeepers for the Olympic Games. Despite various other technological advances, such as the introduction of the co-axial escapement, which uses a system of three pallets to separate a watch’s locking function from the impulse, thus avoiding the sliding friction of a lever escapement and making their lubrication unnecessary, the company ran into financial difficulties at the same time as Switzerland's other watch making giant, Allgemeine Schweizerische Uhrenindustrie AG. The two firms merged in 1983 as a holding company, ASUAG-SSIH, which was taken over two years later by a group of private investors and renamed SMH (Société de Microélectronique et d'Horlogerie), which then became the Swatch Group in 1998.
ReplyDeleteAll of this promotion of sporting events and competition, celebrity gossip, deal-making news, and other popular culture entertainments serves to soften, disguise, or soften the public’s focus on more serious events. At the turn of the 2nd century, Decimus Iūnius Iuvenālis (Juvenal”) coined the phrase “panem et circenses” (bread and circuses) to characterize an entity’s gaining of public approval via diversion, distraction, and promotion of shallow, short-lived values, and the selfishness and narrowness of ordinary people to the neglect of wider concerns.
ReplyDelete“Naxals” were the guerrillas of a radical leftwing movement that began in Naxalbari in West Bengal and then spread into the less developed areas of rural southern and eastern India; about ½ of India’s 28 states have been affected. The Communist Party of India (Maoist) was formed in 2004 when the People's War Group and the Maoist Communist Centre merged. In 2005 their negotiations with the government of Andhra Pradesh broke down when authorities refused to agree to a written truce, release political prisoners, and redistribute land. After that hundreds of people were killed annually. Among the most active areas of insurgency were the Bastar and Dantewada districts of Chhattisgarh, rich in natural resources but sparsely inhabited by some of the poorest tribal regions in India; in Dantewada, for instance, the National Mineral Development Corporation ran India’s largest iron ore mine for five decades but outsourced all of the employment. Through a combination of force and political mobilization around poor governance, land rights, livelihood and social inequity, the Naxal gained considerable influence and control.
The first local anti-Naxal group in Bastar was the Jan Jagran Abhiyan, a group consisting mostly of traders and businessmen which had been founded in 1991 by the “Bastar Tiger,” Mahendra Karma, an ethnic Adivasi leader from a locally powerful family who had lost nearly two dozen relatives to Naxal violence. Though he had begun his political career with the Communist Party of India (CPI), winning his first election on that ticket, he later affiliated with the Indian National Congress party and held a number of state offices. However, the Jan Jagran Abhiyan effort collapsed, and the leaders had to seek police protection. By 2006, though, the state had signed mining agreements with the Tata and Essar groups and was eager to eliminate the Naxal insurgency so the mining companies could operate smoothly. With government support, Karma organized the Salwa Judum (Gondi for "Peace March" or "Purification Hunt") militia consisting of local tribal youth. Salwa Judum herded 100,000 villagers into makeshift camps for training and indoctrination, while destroying at least 644 villages and forcing 300,000 inhabitants to evacuate. It deployed over 12,000 poorly trained minors to act as soldiers in Dantewada alone, while Chhattisgarh officially recruited another 4,200 of them as “special police officers” (popularly referred to as “Koya commandos”). The Naxal responded by splitting into smaller groups and specifically targeting Salwa Judum leaders and security personnel in ambushes; in 2008, Chhattisgarh and neighboring Jharkhand accounted for over 65% of Naxal violence. By the end of the year, the militia only had 13,000 soldiers in 23 camps, though the state continued to recruit SPOs.
ReplyDeleteIn February 2009, the Supreme Court declared the arming of civilians was illegal. On 5 July 2011, it ordered Chhattisgarh to "immediately cease and desist from using SPOs in any manner or form in any activities, directly or indirectly” and to recover all its weapon materiel, and the next day it outlawed Salwa Judum. According to the court, "Given humanity's collective experience with unchecked power, which becomes its own principle and its practice its own raison d'etre, resulting in the eventual dehumanisation of all the people, the scouring of the earth by the unquenchable thirst for natural resources by imperialist powers, and the horrors of two World Wars, modern Constitutionalism posits that no wielder of power should be allowed to claim the right to perpetrate the state's violence against any one, much less its own citizens, unchecked by law, and notions of innate human dignity of every individual." (On 25 May 2013, Naxal assassinated Karma and other political leaders with a bomb; then he was stabbed multiple times by female rebels.)
ReplyDeleteIn 2011, the central government launched a largely successful "Integrated Action Plan" (IAP) for broad, co-ordinated operations against the insurgents, including economic development and increased funding of special police. By 1916, Bastar was one of the few Nazal strongholds left in the country and was increasingly the focus of military operations spearheaded by inspector general S. R. Kalluri. Earlier, as Senior Superintendent of Police, he had been involved in attacks on three villages in Dantewada in which security forces allegedly burnt homes and killed five people. As inspector general, Kalluri increasingly used the District Reserve Group, made up of former Naxal prisoners, to accompany the state police and paramilitary forces as guides and collaborators. In 2013, only 28 of 39 applications were cleared, and in 2012, only 23 out of 39. But in 2014, when Kalluri took over, the police claimed 421 Naxal had defected, although the panel responsible for the program, under the direction of R. K. Vij rejected 316 of them; in 2015, it rejected 91of 327 cases and approved just 36. In January 2016 Vij was transferred. The next month, police ordered a taxi driver in Jagdalpur, the Bastar district headquarters, to report to the station late at night, seized his vehicle, and sent him home at 2 in the morning with orders to evict his tenants, Isha Khandelwal and Shalini Gera of the Jagdalpur Legal Aid Group which represented tribal rights in the area. The same tactic was employed against Malini Subramaniam, a reporter for Scroll.in who had been critical of the DRG. A month later, a group called the Samajik Ekta Manch demonstrated outside her new home and warned her not to sully the police; early the next morning someone threw rocks at her house and broke her car’s rear window; it took the police two days to register a report, but they detained her maid for several hours of interrogation and blamed the rock throwing on her. At a press conference Kalluri told reporters, “We don’t care about the national media. You have a different way of looking at things. We work with the media in Bastar, that sits with us, eats with us, and comes in helicopters with us.” He also claimed that the Jagdalpur Bar Association had passed a resolution against the JLAG, “these lawyers from outside,” a claim disputed by the president of the JBA. Days later, BBC Hindi correspondent Alok Putul reported that Kalluri told him that he only had time “for patriotic journalists.” Despite the 2011 Supreme Court rulings, the state government held that the DRG was not a vigilante group but instead converted insurgents who had been subsumed in the police system through formal channels and training. However, despite official claims that the DRG were held to the same standards of conduct as all other police officers, a senior officer bragged about their immense “flexibility” in combat situations: “Well-trained forces follow standard operating procedures. These surrendered cadres don’t follow rules.” A number of police excesses were reported; in November 2015, women accused the DRG of sexual assault. Meanwhile the number of slain Naxal continued to rise dramatically to record levels. In 2015, the police recovered the bodies of 46 alleged Naxal, but by February the number for 2016 had already reached 21. In Sulenga, a village in the Madum area of Bastar, the police killed a man they identified as a Naxal with a reward on him. Tribal activist Soni Sori claimed that the victim was an innocent farmer who had been asked by the police to show them the way into the jungle. When she raised a complaint, three men assaulted her and rubbed a corrosive grease-like liquid on her face, warning her “not to speak against the IG, and let the issue of the Madum encounter go.” D. M, Awasthi of the Anti Naxal Operations insisted he “does not feel Bastar has become a police state.”
ReplyDeleteTremendous poem. Oppression in the times of ball play.I wish the score board everywhere would begin and end with love all.
ReplyDelete