ViBGYOR is entering its 8th year. From its beginning in 2006, ViBGYOR has taken a different path, by bringing films and filmmakers to places where ordinary people live, to people who do not have a camera or a canvas to bring their stories to light. Beginning with `Water’ as its special focus theme, each year ViBGYOR highlights an important global-local sociopolitical concern as its Focus theme.
Democratic ideals stay frozen in constitutions across the world,
promises of transferring power to people get repeated from centres of
governance and praises are showered by media and the intelligentsia ad
nauseum on the alleged progress made in transferring power to people.
While these sloganeering on democracy continues non-stop, ordinary
people are consciously kept at the receiving end always and small
communities and minorities are pushed to the margins and into oblivion,
robbing them of their basic rights and resources. Irrespective of their
professed commitment to socialism or capitalism, all nation states try
hard to create a false impression that true democracy exists within
their borders. They all brag about having a government `of the people
and by the people’ and venerate democracy every year on the day of
independence or the day of the republic and make a big deal about it.
But they would silence voices of dissent and smartly hide any instances
of repression and then they may even offer a lesson or two on
`democracy’ and `human rights’ to their neighbouring nations and to the
whole world!
The apparent success of the so called `digital democracy’ in the
cyberspace and the various recent attempts at taking those victories
from the virtual to the real space seemed to give new hope to
alternative political initiatives that struggle to foster democratic
peoples’ movements and alignments across the globe. The so called `Arab
Spring’ that illuminated the horizons of many nations in the region like
Egypt, Yemen and Bahrain and many more and the various `Occupy’
movements across the world (`Occupy Wall Street’ being the prominent
among them), have been instrumental in radiating these rays of hope in
democracy. But any innocence left with those initiatives were also
`stolen’ by the sensationalising media and the patronising fundamental
religious `brotherhoods’.
When the political lobbies and leaders continue to conspire against
one’s own nations in collusion with the transnational corporations and
let their peoples and resources `bought/ sold’, is there any real space
left for democracy anywhere? This is the fundamental question that
ViBGYOR-2013 raises. At the 8th ViBGYOR, apart from the screenings of
films on the Focus Theme `stolen democracies’, various other activities
like `C. Saratchandran Memorial Lecture’, Mini Conferences, Campaigns,
Discussions, Music recitals and Exhibitions will be organized in view of
raising awareness and generating discussions on the focus theme and
related topics.
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