Review: README.txt by Chelsea Manning

Readme.txt

I remember back in the days when Bradley Manning had become famous for outing secrets of the abuse of power by powers that be. However, some time later, it was Chelsea Manning who was being named. In those days, I had no idea of trans issues and was sort of confused that why is Bradley being called Chelsea and what’s with this ‘transition’? How can a man transition into a woman by growing long hair? Identities are complex and had no idea about transitioning and other related topics.

Nevertheless, README.txt is an important chronicle of how Bradley grows up in a broken household, struggles to find a footing in life, and often disdains authority. His experiences of longing for belonging and growing up in a conservative America and then experiencing homelessness are touching and makes one understand the struggles he had to go through. Somehow he ends up joining the U.S. Forces after walking into their recruitment camp. But his struggles don’t end there. He tells you how, as a trans person, he constantly faced harrassment. He was good with computers from a very young age, and that’s what propelled him to be in Intelligence in Iraq. However, the journey wasn’t as straightforward.

The interesting bits of the story for most readers would be where he starts uploading classified war material onto Wikileaks, including the infamous Collateral Damage video from Iraq. He writes about the lax information security practices which exist, like the ability to copy data just by plugging in a USB, or writing data to DVDs which could just be carried over to one’s personal barracks. He was however outed as someone who was uploading these secrets by Adrian Lamo, the disgraced hacker who was contacted by Bradley to garner support and advice for making these acts of the U.S. in Iraq more visible to the world. Lamo told the agencies about this and Bradley was arrested. Bradley’s arrest is painful to read to put it mildly. He writes about this cage in Kuwait where he is put in solitary.

After years of struggle and intentional bureaucratic wrangling, he is sentenced. However, Obama, the same guy who doubled down on dissenters and leakers, pardons Bradley (now Chelsea), probably in an effort to burnish his own image, apparently fearful how he would be remembered. Chelsea however is not bereft of biases against Trump and conservatives. He clubs his own sufferings and then goes on an unintelligent tirade that all minorities of colour, gender, religion are being persecuted.

It’s an important book to be read to understand how authoritarian U.S. works when something doesn’t suit it.

Review: Permanent Record by Edward Snowden

Permanent Record

I was quite surprised that Edward Snowden wrote this book. Because he had categorically stated, when he had exposed spying by American agencies like NSA, CIA etc., that he wanted the focus on the various programs of surveillance and spying and not on him. He had purposefully kept himself out of spotlight by giving very few interviews. The writing of this book may have been motivated by financial reasons because Snowden’s assets had been frozen by the US authorities.

Snowden is not only intelligent but also courageous. He exposed the evil ways in which NSA and the likes went unhindered in their assault on freedom of regular citizens like you and I.

This book provides details of Snowden growing up and being a computer geek right childhood due to his dad. And then he decides not to continue his education beyond high school. However he did get a job as a security guard and due to lax intake requirements back then and the overwhelming open positions, he was taken in later in a technical position. Snowden exposes not only the various different programs used by the government to spy, but also how embassies worldwide have become only spots for surveillance and nothing more. He writes how he went to Switzerland and Japan to strengthen the data collection practices. He also is unabashedly critical of the main stream media (not as much as Greenwald though).

Towards the end, Snowden recounts his escape from Hong Kong and how, while at Moscow airport, is interrogated by the Russian agents and asked to cooperate with them so they could take care of him. Ultimately he refused and stayed there for many months. Finally, because he was attracting too much attention at the airport, he was given permit to exit the Moscow airport. He has lived in Russia since then.

‘Permanent Record’ is a must read book. It should be made mandatory in schools and colleges and I wish it becomes a manifesto of sorts for our freedom and tyranny of governments and technology.

Review: The Divider by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser

The Divider

It has become fashionable to criticize Trump and get away with it. Most of the book covers about Trump (and Putin and Xi / China) have a blazing red or blood red cover. This one, for a change, has a more classy white with a sliver of black. This book is hefty, and will take a good amount of time for one to cover, because it is so detailed as to literally have statements in double-quotes on almost every page.

When Trump won in 2016, I was quite happy and still sort of support him because he was an outsider in the sense of being a non-politician. Politicians have milked the system for too long for their own benefits, and hence an outsider, an entrepreneur at that, was a good thing. Of course Trump has an abrasive personality and he did not tone it down when he became the most powerful man on earth. I first saw Trump in the Apprentice show back in 2000s. I loved his style and his signature line “you are fired”. I remember reading in New Yorker in 2015 how paid actors were asked to appear at a Trump rally and the author was sort of happy that they (or whoever) had exposed it. Am sure New Yorker was stunned at the election results.

The book covers the entire period of Trump in White House and does manage to show that there was lot of infighting and chaos behind the scenes. To top it, Trump’s habit of tweeting to the world and then his team getting to know of his decision did not help one bit. But he surely did take lot of strong decisions and rankled up the leftist ecosystem who had led the country astray with their stupid policies. The most powerful nation cannot stop illegal immigrants from crossing over the border? Trump promised the wall, but of course could not complete it because of obvious lack of support in the House.

However, the focus of this book and its authors (they wrote for NYT itself should be a clear indicator) is to show that Trump and his White House never did even one thing correctly. No wonder I don’t take these kinds of books too seriously lest they cloud my thinking. Obama and his administration lied about how Osama bin Laden was killed and then even supplanted their fake theory in Zero Dark Thirty. Whereas Trump got Baghdadi and Soleimani killed, yet never got any credit in NYT or WaPo. Am not getting into the merits or demerits of killing Soleimani, but just bringing forth the point that when you read only NYT and WaPo, you will never read one thing positive about Trump or Republicans. That Trump ordered the pull out from Afghanistan did not merit praise, that he did not start any new military operations anywhere did not merit praise, that he cornered China did not merit praise, that he did as best as could to combat Covid pandemic and the economic fallout did not merit praise.

So with that in mind, you should definitely read this book for understanding how Trump operated and his antics upset many leaders like Merkel and Trudeau.

Review: No Place to Hide by Gleen Greenwald

No Place To Hide

Edward Snowden is one othe bravest men in recent history. He risked his lifestyle, life, and even his family to reveal the dark truths of surveillance by the United States government machinery via NSA, FBI, CIA, MI6 and what not. No wonder Snowden has always been and will be treated as a pariah. Anybody who pays the slightest attention to the mainstream media cabal would understand that it (the cabal) is just an arm of the government and sometimes the agencies which not always be aligned to the government. As Greenwald writes in some of the pages of his book, often the journalists are just stenographers who take instructions from the powers that be and put it out as news, or, even better, ‘breaking’ news.

When Snowden had exposed the ill intentions and wrong-doings more than a decade ago, I wasn’t that interested in the topic except that it was being broken as a big news item by Guardian and it was trending for few days on Twitter back then. I really didn’t show much interest in it. Over the last few years, it is clear that I can no longer ignore it myself and am always aware that there is absolutely nothing which the govenment doesn’t want to know about me: my websites, my contacts, my passwords, my WiFi, my location, my calls, my metadata, my data. Nothing is left to being unknown. I have zero trust in governments. I am good as long as I stand straight or even bend over backwards. The moment I lean forward and show the finger to the government or agencies, I am done. Their technological arsenal is going to be bombarded at whatever they have collected of me, and even more collection would be done through zero-day exploits, no-click URLs, remotely activated cameras/microphones, and even through means I may be completely unaware of. Your so-called smart devices, smart TVs, automatic robot vaccumm, microwave, light fixtures can all be turned into spying devices by someone sitting in Maryland, or New York (33 Thomas Street Building), or anywhere in the world for that matter. And it is not just the US who is doing it, it is definitely all the developed countries, five eyes, fourteen eyes, and many more which may be hidden from us, including many others like India, China, Japan, Brazil, Russia etc.

If Barry Meier’s book was a shocker, Greenwald’s is even more so. It begins with Greenwald getting an email, asking him to setup a PGP for his email communication. And, I hate Greenwald for this, for months he did not do that! For months! All the while Snowden was waiting to communicate with him and show what he had got out of the surveillance state for the world to see. It was Laura Poitras who ultimately got the lead and made things happen by planning a trip to Hong Kong to meet Snowden. Had it been left to Greenwald, it would have taken years and maybe Snowden himself might have been caught before he could expose the uninhibited spying.

The book focuses on lot of technical programs which the NSA and the likes had developed to collect and analyze information from all sorts of networks around the world, not just within US. However, the more important aspect of the book is the details revealing how Laura had been treated by the US immigration authorities everytime she entered her own country, how Greenwald himself had become bête noire of the mainstream media cabal, and how this very cabal had known to some extent almost a decade ago about illegal spying by the agencies but kept mum under the instructions of the state. Those pages are telling and should worry us to no end that the ‘courageous free enterprise’ called media is not so free after all and is just a mouthpiece.

Recently examples have shown it. Countless books have been written about Trump, all in negative light. Elon Musk is suddenly the ‘bad guy’ because he bought Twitter and often rants against Democrats. ‘Elon bad’ is the new coke out there. If Seymour Hersh could not be spared, with his article – exposing that it was the US behind the destruction of Nord Stream pipeline – being called a ‘blog’!, what authority and credibility do you and I have? This is the new world we live in, where either you comply and bend, or you will be under fire from the powers, the agencies, the media cabal. Seymour has written how the movie Zero Dark Thirty was a work of fiction and was released to boost Obama’s ratings before the elections so that Democrats could bank on it and make lady Clinton win! Greenwald also writes how Obama, who is workshipped by New York Times, and the mainstream media cabal, was one of the most undemocratic presidents who went after the media to punish them for supporting Snowden and anybody who exposed the dystopian clog of the machinery.

Comply or die is the new adage.

This is a must-read book. Just drop everthing that you are doing and pick this up.

Review: Missing Man by Barry Meier

Missing Man

Barry Meier has crafted a thriller in Missing Man, tracking the disappearance of Robert Levinson (Bob), a former FBI agent and who was later working as a contractor to CIA. Bob disappeared when he went to Kish Island from Dubai for a “side trip” to reach a nut head Dawud Salahuddin. The purpose of Bob’s visit was to get information from Dawud about Iraninan regime’s possible methods which may be resorted to in the future in case US imposed sanctions on Iran due to uranium enrichment. Dawud was constantly feeding him how Rafsanjani had spread his tentacles into financial crime and money laundering and had even invested in various projects in Canada. Barry’s narration doesn’t keep you on the edge of the seat, but is more like an undercurrent of suspense which links the whole plot together.

Bob was struggling financially to keep up with the expenses for his family as his childrent (seven of them) went from school to college to their jobs and finally married life. Bob had worked in FBI for multiple decades and had forged strong connections within the intelligene and law enforcement agencies. When he started working as a CIA contractor in the hopes of getting more excitement and possibly better remuneration, he was dishing out copious amounts of reports for his handler Anne Jablonski, who teaches yoga. The financial unit of the CIA wanted dirt on the political elite in Ian and Bob made a connection with Dawud via the journalist Ira.

This book however is also an eye opener that the FBI and CIA are after all two arms of the government, where bureaucracy and red tape have rusted the piston as with any other departments of the government. The details about how Bob used to struggle to get his contracts finalized on time, reaching out to different departments within CIA for additional budget, and even spending money from his own pocket with the hope that eventually the bills would be tabled for reimbursement. But it is also a story we all know too well: government’s shirking away from owning up when things go south. After Bob was reported missing, CIA refused to acknowledge that Bob had gone to Iran (Kish) at its behest. The intelligence agencies were trying (not sincerely enough though) to get information about Bob through other means: Russian oligarchs, Kurdish fighters, Iranian exiles. Then there were people who had contacted the Levinson family through the website setup by them to give them tips. Somebody even sent emails few times from a Gmail id “osman.muhamad@gmail.com” but initially the emails were marked as hoax by the agencies, a decision which came to haunt them later. [The recovery email associated with it is “nsa******@gmail.com”, where the “*” may represent any characters but probably could be 6 characters. However, presence of “nsa” at the beginning of the recovery email might indicate that the person behind both of these email ids is trying to mock the US authorities]

Nobody still knows the complete truth about Bob, though there was a military court order from Iran which was shared by an Iranian exile in Germany. As much as one would want to dig deeper into the mystery, the outline is that Bob was a victim of the worsening relations between Iran and US. He was probably detained as a collateral for bargaining in negotiations. None of it worked though it seems when in 2020 the Levinson family released a statement that they were contacted by the authorities in US to inform them that it was believed that Bob had died while in custody in Iran.

I would highly recommend this book to understand how the world of spies is not as glorious as depicted in movies, and how they too are not above the shenanigans of government inefficiencies and inter-agency rivalries. Then there’s media too which played along the CIA version that Bob wasn’t their agent in the hope that it would be safer for Bob that way in captivity. It would have been a dramatic victory if Bob had been located or even released, but that were not to be (yet).

Review: Saeed – An Actor’s Journey

Saeed’s autobiography

Saeed’s energy was infectious. As an actor, he brought life to the scenes he enacted, full of verve and curiosity. Some of his roles which I remember unforgettably were in Shatranj ke Khiladi and My Beautiful Laundrette. There was a childish zeal in him which even the dullest of the scenes exciting.

The book starts from, well, the beginning, as he writes, “I suppose I should begin my memoirs right from the very beginning. I was born on a Sunday, on 8th January, in a Muslim feudal state in the north-west province of Punjab called Maler Kotla”. Surprisingly, he leaves out the year 1929. His father was a doctor, and his mother a homemaker. Quite a privileged life he did lead in his childhood due to the stature of his father’s profession. And, as he rightly mentions, he was a ‘brown sahib’ in India, sometimes more British than the British. His years in United Provinces (Uttar Pradesh) and attending various schools shaped his affinity towards English language. And his Muslim upbringing helped him in honing his skills in Urdu / Hindustani.

He later joined the All India Radio in Delhi and got the Fulbright scholarship to attend a drama school in America. The book is full of characters, names, places, and events. It doesn’t feel boring for a bit and engages the reader as if he is conversing with him/her. He writes about the various intimate affairs he had with countless women and establishes his reputation as a ladies’ man. His divorce with Madhur, “M” as he calls her, and separation with his children are few of the tragic chapters of his life.

Though as much as he was successful in India, UK, and America, he still did face lot of racist behaviour. His struggles to make ends meet with no regular income, and taking odd jobs like a bartender, or even a bureaucrat, highlight the unpredictability of the creative fields. He recounts his experiences of having met / worked with lot of giants like Marilyn Monroe, Sean Connery, Sanjeev Kumar, Satyajit Ray, Raj Kapoor and many others.

An entertaining book to say the least. Saeed Jaffrey passed away in 2015 of old age.

 

Reflections: Loins of Punjab Presents

Loins of Punjab

One afternoon, almost a year ago, I came across this movie being played on one of the English movie channels. The name instantly caught my eye – not Lions but Loins.I could watch the first twenty or so minutes of it then got embroiled in other tasks and had to skip seeing the remaining part. Nonetheless, it left an enduring image strong enough to propel me to buy a DVD of it – that too on a random visit to Crossword.

 

The characters, the setting, the mannerisms of the characters and their dressing style reeks of ABCD’s (American Born Confused Desi‘s) and is a riot of errors – the musical and comical ones. Loins of Punjab is a firm specializing in pork and is organizing a Desi Idol, probably in
New Jersey (excuse my geography of USA). A multitude of characters get to know of it and want tot try their hand at winning the $25,000 cash prize. Rrita Kapoor (with a double R, played by Mrs. Shabana Azmi), BDG (Ajay Naidu), Preeti Patel (by Ishita Sharma) and Josh (Michael Raimondi) are the most memorable ones. Rrita is a philanthropist but more of an egoist who wants to win and show it to the world how large her heart (read kitty) is; BDG is a brash Sardar with in-your-face fuck-you-motherfucker attitude with a pal of his always in tow; Preeti Patel is the typical docile Gujju girl with a whole entourage of hers – her cousins, uncles, aunts, younger brother (who is underage but already hooked to porn like Pulp Friction, Batman and Throbbin); and Josh is an American smitten by things Indian like yoga, music and movies. 

 

Rrita conspires to defeat the others by putting her own mole as one of the judges to get insider information about the performances of other aspirants. BDG is brash and swears at the thought of drop of a hat. And Preeti Patel (for whose parents singing can only be a Ho-Bee) is the best singer, matched only by Rrita. In the whole melee of events, Josh wins the competition towards the end and Mr. Bokade (Jameel Khan), the organizer, is left to defend on how an ‘outsider’ could win the Desi Idol.

 

This is one of those few movies which made me laugh out loudly even though I was watching it alone! The contestants are, yes, typical but the movie goes beyond that and humorously brings out serious topics  like the bias against Muslims and Sikhs after 9-11, the Indian community refusing to mingle with the Americans and treating them as ‘outsiders’ in their own country, the suffocating attitude of Indian parents wanting their children to become only a doctor or engineer and the difficulties of American-born persons with Indian background to come to terms with their own culture. By far, though I haven’t seen all, one of the top three ABCD-themed movies.

 

Two reverberating scenes which refuse to fade from memory are: BDG doing the Bhangra Hip-Hop in the finals after sneaking in – the energy and excitement he generates in the audience makes your hair actually stand up; and Josh singing the Indian National Anthem!

 

A must watch.

Update: The Making

I did not watch the complementary DVD right away as I didn’t expect much in it except a few customary interviews, behind the scenes and recording. But when I did – there is only one word by which I can describe the whole effort put by the crew in getting the movie made: WOW!

I thought the whole of the movie was shot in the US, but no – the locations were all sets created in and around Bombay. The behind the scenes with Manish Acharya brings out how much trouble the director has to go through along with the other production cast to get everything done on time. And it only saddened me to know that Manish Acharya, who even played the role of a super intelligent finance guy in the movie, died in December, 2010 in Matheran as he fell down from a horse and hit his head. His last tweet was on 3-Dec-2010.