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India Today
11 hours ago
- Business
- India Today
Disaster after disaster: Who is accountable?
It was meant to be a week when the Narendra Modi-led NDA government would celebrate its 11th year in power with the signature 'band, baaja, baraat' media hype that has been its forte. And yet, for once, even the astute headline management skills of the government's cheerleaders couldn't detract from the awfulness of the breaking news in the second week of June: at least 270 people died in the worst civil aviation disaster in this country since two planes collided mid-air in 1996. That the Air India flight 171 crashed just outside Ahmedabad in Gujarat, the home state of the government's Big Two, perhaps makes the tragedy even more poignant. Far from celebrating a political party milestone, the nation was united in it is premature to speculate over the causes of the crash – various aviation 'experts' in TV studios have proffered different theories – the crash has triggered a renewed debate over air safety. While official data suggests India's safety track record is at par with global standards, there are enough reasons for concern. A Tata Group-run Air India management still coming to terms with the fact that running a legacy airline is not quite the same as managing a steel or any other consumer business; Boeing, the world's largest aerospace company that finds itself under scrutiny once again; the Ministry of Civil Aviation (MOCA) whose supervisory and regulatory powers over a rapidly expanding sector will come under the scanner; the Adani group which manages and operates the Ahmedabad airport will also have to provide to give context. A parliamentary standing committee report on MOCA in March this year pointed out that the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) was operating with 53% of its sanctioned posts vacant, while the Bureau of Civil Aviation Security has a vacancy rate of 35%. The government's ambitious UDAN scheme aims to connect 120 new destinations, but its budget has been slashed by 32%. While the number of airports has nearly doubled in the last decade, the amount being spent on maintaining safety standards lags behind. Which raises a big question: will a horrific air crash change anything on the ground? The black box and flight data recorder may provide more clues as to what happened for a Dreamliner plane to explode into a fireball just seconds after take-off but will the inquiry be fair and transparent in revealing the truth given the mighty stakeholders involved? Which brings one to ask a critical question: is there any ACCOUNTABILITY in our system to ensure responsibility is fixed on key figures in a time-bound manner? Just look at the series of events in a disastrous month of June that still has some days to June 4, just a day after the IPL final, a stampede in Bengaluru during the victory celebrations of the Royal Challengers Bengaluru left 11 people dead, many more injured. The rushed event was organised despite the fact that the police had not given the required permission. With back-to-back events being organised at the Vidhan Soudha and Chinnaswamy Stadium, the police was overwhelmed by the surging crowds. A public spectacle for a privately-run franchise's triumph was given priority over the urgent need for public safety. Instead of accepting responsibility, the faction-ridden Congress government in Karnataka has busily disowned its culpability. Bengaluru's top cop has been suspended while no politician who happily posed with the star players has been held to June 9, four people died and nine were injured in a rail accident in Mumbra near Mumbai. The commuters fell onto the tracks while they were standing on the footboards of overcrowded trains. People hanging by the door in peak hour crowding is not new with a sharp curve along the Mumbra track making it even more hazardous. While a Central Railway committee is probing the incident, the underlying causes of a shambolic public transport system in a megapolis like Mumbai remain unaddressed. Is the creaking suburban train system suffering from neglect as alleged by commuter organisations while the private car traffic whizzes by on a shining coastal road?advertisementOn June 16, a bridge collapsed near Pune due to overcrowding amidst heavy rainfall, leaving four people dead and several more injured. The 30-year-old bridge was deemed 'unsafe' but, despite red flags being raised by locals for several years, a work order for the construction of a new bridge was delayed and reportedly issued only five days before the collapse. Approval of Rs 8 crore for a new bridge was given last year, but bureaucratic red-tapism meant that it was all too late to avoid a tragedy. Yet again, Maharashtra's BJP-led ruling alliance politicians have fulminated and promised action, only presumably until the next bridge collapse serves as another wake-up June 15, seven people died when a chopper flying from Kedarnath temple to Guptkashi in Uttarakhand crashed in the forest. Worryingly, this was the fifth such incident in just six weeks in the area, raising questions over the feasibility of helicopter services in inclement weather in the mountains. Chief Minister Pushkar Dhami has promised to put in place a Standard Operating Procedure while the DGCA has assured extra surveillance. Once again, a case of too little, too the chronology of each such tragedy follows a familiar pattern. Little attention is paid to adhering to strict safety norms in a characteristic 'chalta hai' attitude. Rather than focus on the rigors of daily governance, priority is given to the optics of political grandstanding. More fast trains are flagged, more airports are commissioned, more tourist sites are created, more glitzy sports celebrations are a Viksit Bharat by 2047, as envisaged by the Modi government, is a noble aim. Yet, the grim reality on the ground often doesn't match the dreams being spun in the air in a nation of 1.4 billion people. And then, when every now and then, a rickety bridge collapses, a stampede is caused by mass hysteria or there is a rail or air accident, those in positions of power are the first to shrug off their responsibility. After all, in almost all instances, it is the faceless, anonymous Indian who pays with their lives. Unless there is a fundamental change in approach that places a premium on accountability above all else, we will simply lurch from one disaster to the next. Because in India, if there is one sport that we deserve an Olympic medal in, it is 'passing the buck'.advertisementPost-script: Ironically, just a few days ago, a BBC investigative report exposed the truth of the Mahakumbh stampede deaths in January this year. Officially, the UP government claimed 37 people died, but the detailed BBC investigation found the number was at least 82. If we lie about death, what price is there for human lives?(Rajdeep Sardesai is a senior journalist and author. His latest book is 2024: The Election That Surprised India)(Views expressed in this opinion piece are those of the author)Tune InMust Watch
San Francisco Chronicle
a day ago
- Entertainment
- San Francisco Chronicle
Nero's ancient Rome and Jazz Age New York meet in `The Comet/Poppea' at Lincoln Center
NEW YORK (AP) — Nero's ancient Rome and Jazz Age New York were similar. That is the message of 'The Comet/Poppea,' an intriguing combination of Monteverdi's 1643 opera 'L'incoronazione di Poppea' and George E. Lewis' 'The Comet,' a Pulitzer Prize finalist this year. The mashup conceived by director Yuval Sharon began a five-performance run at Lincoln Center's Summer for the City on Wednesday night. First seen in Los Angeles last year, the American Modern Opera Company production unfolds on a turntable that completes a spin each 2 minutes, 8 seconds. An audience of 380 is split into sections on opposite sides of the set on stage at the David Koch Theater while the venue's 2,586 auditorium seats remain empty. 'It's an unstable ride over the course of 90 minutes, and the power of the interpretation is up to each and every spectator,' Sharon said. 'Whether you're on one side of the seating bank or the other, you're going to have a totally different experience and you may miss a really important piece of action that your imagination is going to have to fill.' In Monteverdi's final opera, created to Giovanni Francesco Busenello's libretto, Nerone exiles his wife Ottavia, leaving him free to crown Poppea empress. Lewis composed 'The Comet' to librettist Douglas Kearney's adaption of W.E.B. Du Bois' dystopian eight-page 1920 short story in which a working-class Black man, Jim (Davóne Tines), and a society white woman, Julia (Kiera Duffy), believe they are the only survivors of a comet and can join to form a prejudice-free society. Their aspirations collapse when they learn people outside New York remained alive and segregation was unconquerable. 'People can make the leap between the music they're hearing and the kinds of tensions that are inherent to modern life and the tensions that the opera presents and the text presents, particularly around the dystopian aspect of white supremacy,' Lewis said. 'White supremacy is a kind of dystopia and it's a dystopia that we continue to live with today." Mimi Lien's two-sided set, illuminated strikingly by John Torres, is tiered with a bath at the top level on the Roman portion and a red Art Deco restaurant evoking the Rainbow Room on the other, where Jim and Julia find three dead bodies slumped. 'Jim is confronted with what it means to be the only man left alive, what it newly means to be a Black man allowed into spaces he wasn't before, but then have that dream crushed by the reality of Julia also inhabiting that space," said Tines, a commanding presence as Jim and the smaller role of Mercury. 'The Comet/Poppea' debuted at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA last June and also was performed with a student cast in Philadelphia in November. It is part of a Run AMOC* festival of 12 productions at Lincoln Center that include 10 New York premieres. Friday's performance can been viewed on a live stream on Lincoln Center's Facebook and YouTube channels. Planning, writing and funding took years Sharon first discussed the project in 2018 with countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, who sings Nerone and Julia's father, a stuffed shirt dressed like Mr. Monopoly. 'It fell apart so many times,' Constanzo said. 'First, the pandemic came, and so all of our plans we'd put together were dashed. Then we had one co-producer who was giving a lot of money and they pulled out. Then we got another co-producer to put that much money in again and they pulled out." Sharon had met Lewis at a 2018 Columbia University conference and approached him with the idea of concentrating on Poppea's upward mobility and creating 'a secondary story to complicate and to make a mess of this idea of authoritarianism.' Sharon trimmed 'Poppea' to its essence. Lewis' music, filled with dissonance and a snippet of jazz, mixes with the Monterverdi's baroque, which Jim first hears from the restaurant jukebox. 'The conception was one in which you knew from the beginning that there are moments of overlap, there are moments of exchange, of sequentiality,' Lewis said. 'It could stand alone by itself, `The Comet,' certainly." Lincoln Center is presenting a more ambitious offering of classical events after drawing criticisms in the first three seasons of Summer for the City that emerged from the pandemic. There are 266 scheduled events from June 11 through Aug. 9. Programs are set to include jazz, Latin music, R&B, Broadway, pop, Caribbean, dance and more.
Winnipeg Free Press
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Winnipeg Free Press
Nero's ancient Rome and Jazz Age New York meet in `The Comet/Poppea' at Lincoln Center
NEW YORK (AP) — Nero's ancient Rome and Jazz Age New York were similar. That is the message of 'The Comet/Poppea,' an intriguing combination of Monteverdi's 1643 opera 'L'incoronazione di Poppea' and George E. Lewis' 'The Comet,' a Pulitzer Prize finalist this year. The mashup conceived by director Yuval Sharon began a five-performance run at Lincoln Center's Summer for the City on Wednesday night. First seen in Los Angeles last year, the American Modern Opera Company production unfolds on a turntable that completes a spin each 2 minutes, 8 seconds. An audience of 380 is split into sections on opposite sides of the set on stage at the David Koch Theater while the venue's 2,586 auditorium seats remain empty. 'It's an unstable ride over the course of 90 minutes, and the power of the interpretation is up to each and every spectator,' Sharon said. 'Whether you're on one side of the seating bank or the other, you're going to have a totally different experience and you may miss a really important piece of action that your imagination is going to have to fill.' In Monteverdi's final opera, created to Giovanni Francesco Busenello's libretto, Nerone exiles his wife Ottavia, leaving him free to crown Poppea empress. Lewis composed 'The Comet' to librettist Douglas Kearney's adaption of W.E.B. Du Bois' dystopian eight-page 1920 short story in which a working-class Black man, Jim (Davóne Tines), and a society white woman, Julia (Kiera Duffy), believe they are the only survivors of a comet and can join to form a prejudice-free society. Their aspirations collapse when they learn people outside New York remained alive and segregation was unconquerable. 'People can make the leap between the music they're hearing and the kinds of tensions that are inherent to modern life and the tensions that the opera presents and the text presents, particularly around the dystopian aspect of white supremacy,' Lewis said. 'White supremacy is a kind of dystopia and it's a dystopia that we continue to live with today.' Different styles for different eras Mimi Lien's two-sided set, illuminated strikingly by John Torres, is tiered with a bath at the top level on the Roman portion and a red Art Deco restaurant evoking the Rainbow Room on the other, where Jim and Julia find three dead bodies slumped. 'Jim is confronted with what it means to be the only man left alive, what it newly means to be a Black man allowed into spaces he wasn't before, but then have that dream crushed by the reality of Julia also inhabiting that space,' said Tines, a commanding presence as Jim and the smaller role of Mercury. 'The Comet/Poppea' debuted at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA last June and also was performed with a student cast in Philadelphia in November. It is part of a Run AMOC(asterisk) festival of 12 productions at Lincoln Center that include 10 New York premieres. Friday's performance can been viewed on a live stream on Lincoln Center's Facebook and YouTube channels. Planning, writing and funding took years Sharon first discussed the project in 2018 with countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, who sings Nerone and Julia's father, a stuffed shirt dressed like Mr. Monopoly. Weekly A weekly look at what's happening in Winnipeg's arts and entertainment scene. 'It fell apart so many times,' Constanzo said. 'First, the pandemic came, and so all of our plans we'd put together were dashed. Then we had one co-producer who was giving a lot of money and they pulled out. Then we got another co-producer to put that much money in again and they pulled out.' Sharon had met Lewis at a 2018 Columbia University conference and approached him with the idea of concentrating on Poppea's upward mobility and creating 'a secondary story to complicate and to make a mess of this idea of authoritarianism.' Sharon trimmed 'Poppea' to its essence. Lewis' music, filled with dissonance and a snippet of jazz, mixes with the Monterverdi's baroque, which Jim first hears from the restaurant jukebox. 'The conception was one in which you knew from the beginning that there are moments of overlap, there are moments of exchange, of sequentiality,' Lewis said. 'It could stand alone by itself, `The Comet,' certainly.' Lincoln Center is presenting a more ambitious offering of classical events after drawing criticisms in the first three seasons of Summer for the City that emerged from the pandemic. There are 266 scheduled events from June 11 through Aug. 9. Programs are set to include jazz, Latin music, R&B, Broadway, pop, Caribbean, dance and more.
Yahoo
10-06-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
The downtown L.A. mural that was a prophetic backdrop to ICE street protests
As protesters swarmed downtown Los Angeles to denounce ICE raids in their communities and the deployment of the National Guard, a potent image kept flashing across television screens and social media: officers in riot gear facing off against flag- and sign-waving demonstrators in front of a strikingly resonant, red mural posing a series of queries interrogating the very nature of power and control. Barbara Kruger's 30-by-191-foot "Questions" takes up the entire side wall of the Museum of Contemporary Art's Geffen Contemporary warehouse building, facing Temple Street and — notably — the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building. Like many of Kruger's most iconic images, including her famous 1989 abortion rights poster, "Your Body Is a Battleground," the mural features words in starkly clear graphic design — in this case, white letters on a red background asking nine now-prophetic questions: "Who is beyond the law? Who is bought and sold? Who is free to choose? Who does the time? Who follows orders? Who salutes longest? Who prays loudest? Who dies first? Who laughs last?" The mural was commissioned in 1990 by former MOCA curator Ann Goldstein, who is now at the the Art Institute of Chicago. Former MOCA Chief Curator Paul Schimmel posted a TV screenshot of protesters in front of the mural on Sunday with the caption, "#Barbara Krugers #moca mural doing its art job as the riots against #ice consume LA." Reached for comment Monday, Schimmel added that Kruger "understood the importance and power of a mural facing the then-new Federal Building. Multiple generations of MOCA staff have brought it back to life because of its profundity." Kruger, a longtime L.A. resident, responded Monday to The Times' request for comment about the mural's immersion in this fraught moment of city history, writing via email: "This provocation is giving Trump what he wants: the moment he can declare martial law. As if that's not already in play." In a YouTube video posted to MOCA's website when the museum reinstalled the mural in 2018, Kruger says: "There was a very visible wall on the side of this building, and it was an opportunity to make a statement about pride and prominence and power and control and fear. The questions were always the important part of the work." At another point in the video, she adds: "One would hope that in the 30 years since, things would have changed a bit. And things have changed. For the good and for the bad, and for everything in between." Images of "Questions" abound on social media, including on X, where a few users recognized the significance of the art behind the protesters. Misinformation has been rampant on social media, and one post showed a photo of a masked individual creeping below the mural with the claim that the person "broke into the MOCA Museum and destroyed everything." A MOCA representative debunked that claim Monday, saying that the museum closed early, at about 1:30 p.m. Sunday, "out of an abundance of caution and for the safety and well-being of our staff and visitors," and that it expected to open again, per its normal operating hours, on Thursday. The museum is always closed Monday through Wednesday. The only damage to the Geffen Contemporary was some graffiti that the museum said could be removed. Adding a hyper-meta art moment, MOCA's current durational performance, "Police State" by Pussy Riot frontwoman Nadya Tolokonnikova, continued until 6 p.m. inside the building, just without its usual live audience. The performance consists of Tolokonnikova sitting at a bare wooden table inside of a corrugated steel structure resembling a Russian prison cell. Tolokonnikova, who spent two years in a Russian prison following a performance in Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, spent those hours Sunday broadcasting live audio of the protests outside mixed with her own heartbeat to the empty museum. "Police State Exhibit Is Closed Due To The Police State," she wrote in a post on X. 'Durational performance is a scary thing to step into: once you said you're going to show up, you can't just leave simply because of the National Guard had a whim to occupy the city, so my choice was to stay and continue doing my job as an artist,' she said in a statement. Get notified when the biggest stories in Hollywood, culture and entertainment go live. Sign up for L.A. Times entertainment alerts. This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.
Los Angeles Times
10-06-2025
- Politics
- Los Angeles Times
The downtown L.A. mural that was a prophetic backdrop to ICE street protests
As protesters swarmed downtown Los Angeles to denounce ICE raids in their communities and the deployment of the National Guard, a potent image kept flashing across television screens and social media: officers in riot gear facing off against flag- and sign-waving demonstrators in front of a strikingly resonant, red mural posing a series of queries interrogating the very nature of power and control. Barbara Kruger's 30-by-191-foot 'Questions' takes up the entire side wall of the Museum of Contemporary Art's Geffen Contemporary warehouse building, facing Temple Street and — notably — the Edward R. Roybal Federal Building. Like many of Kruger's most iconic images, including her famous 1989 abortion rights poster, 'Your Body Is a Battleground,' the mural features words in starkly clear graphic design — in this case, white letters on a red background asking nine now-prophetic questions: 'Who is beyond the law? Who is bought and sold? Who is free to choose? Who does the time? Who follows orders? Who salutes longest? Who prays loudest? Who dies first? Who laughs last?' The mural was commissioned in 1990 by former MOCA curator Ann Goldstein, who is now at the the Art Institute of Chicago. Former MOCA Chief Curator Paul Schimmel posted a TV screenshot of protesters in front of the mural on Sunday with the caption, '#Barbara Krugers #moca mural doing its art job as the riots against #ice consume LA.' Reached for comment Monday, Schimmel added that Kruger 'understood the importance and power of a mural facing the then-new Federal Building. Multiple generations of MOCA staff have brought it back to life because of its profundity.' Kruger, a longtime L.A. resident, responded Monday to The Times' request for comment about the mural's immersion in this fraught moment of city history, writing via email: 'This provocation is giving Trump what he wants: the moment he can declare martial law. As if that's not already in play.' In a YouTube video posted to MOCA's website when the museum reinstalled the mural in 2018, Kruger says: 'There was a very visible wall on the side of this building, and it was an opportunity to make a statement about pride and prominence and power and control and fear. The questions were always the important part of the work.' At another point in the video, she adds: 'One would hope that in the 30 years since, things would have changed a bit. And things have changed. For the good and for the bad, and for everything in between.' Images of 'Questions' abound on social media, including on X, where a few users recognized the significance of the art behind the protesters. Misinformation has been rampant on social media, and one post showed a photo of a masked individual creeping below the mural with the claim that the person 'broke into the MOCA Museum and destroyed everything.' A MOCA representative debunked that claim Monday, saying that the museum closed early, at about 1:30 p.m. Sunday, 'out of an abundance of caution and for the safety and well-being of our staff and visitors,' and that it expected to open again, per its normal operating hours, on Thursday. The museum is always closed Monday through Wednesday. The only damage to the Geffen Contemporary was some graffiti that the museum said could be removed. Adding a hyper-meta art moment, MOCA's current durational performance, 'Police State' by Pussy Riot frontwoman Nadya Tolokonnikova, continued until 6 p.m. inside the building, just without its usual live audience. The performance consists of Tolokonnikova sitting at a bare wooden table inside of a corrugated steel structure resembling a Russian prison cell. Tolokonnikova, who spent two years in a Russian prison following a performance in Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, spent those hours Sunday broadcasting live audio of the protests outside mixed with her own heartbeat to the empty museum. 'Police State Exhibit Is Closed Due To The Police State,' she wrote in a post on X. 'Durational performance is a scary thing to step into: once you said you're going to show up, you can't just leave simply because of the National Guard had a whim to occupy the city, so my choice was to stay and continue doing my job as an artist,' she said in a statement.
