Tassled and garlanded, India’s first indigenously built aircraft carrier, INS Vikrant II, was launched on Monday 12^th August by the Defence Minister’s wife. In keeping with Indian tradition, she marked the occasion by throwing a coconut at the ship’s hull.

Alongside Mr and Mrs AK Antony, the procession of dignitaries at Cochin shipyard included the head of the Indian Navy and the minister for shipping.

If it was a building instead of a ship, INS Vikrant II would be the London 2012 Aquatics Centre: both structures follow the same wave form. Fish shapes for people to swim and sail in; designed to show that athletes, sailors, all of us are responding to nature nowadays rather than overriding it.

How different is the new Vikrant from its eponymous predecessor? Built on the wartime Tyne as HMS Hercules, laid up for 15 years, then bought off-the-peg and re-named by the Indian Navy. Nice bit of schmutter for posing against Pakistan, the man from the Admiralty must have said. Feel the width of this flight deck.

Back in the days when warships were all corners and angles (not curves and waves), and ratings stood to attention like a heap of iron filings.

‘Vikrant’ meaning the one who steps forward. To boldly go.

On Monday, members of Vikrant II’s launch party must have felt the world opening up to them; rewarding India’s audacity. Only four other countries – France, Russia, UK and USA – currently have this capability. We’re already in the Top Five!

Only hours later, 18 Indian sailors died in the confined spaces of an Indian Navy submarine which exploded into flames in Mumbai Harbour. Minus his wife, the Defence Minister was obliged to go on TV to offer his condolences, duly echoed by the head of the navy.

Another memorable day, but on this occasion Monday’s ‘historic’ footage was running in reverse. read more

In Stone Town, Zanzibar, two young British women were attacked by men on a moped who threw acid at them. Prompted by a photograph displayed on the website of the project which the women were volunteering for at the time, this short piece seeks to sketch out why the attack took place. Unashamedly conjectural – fanciful, even – it is perhaps more factual (literally, of what has been done) than labelling the incident as ‘Muslim extremism.’

“I joined the music project organised by an NGO in my country. I’m wearing the T-shirt one of the volunteers gave me. Tommy Hilfiger or somesuch. And there we are, me and Josh or somesuch, mixing the track with me on drums and him on guitar. It’s his hand on the faders and he fades down the kick drum with that double kick on the fourth which I sweated to get, and brings up his guitar.

“Of course he turns and smiles and asks if that’s OK, and I say it is OK but that is the moment when I am not OK with this NGO set-up nor will I be so ever again.

“Suddenly I see myself from outside myself, looking in on him and me, and I see it’s always going to be him first, his hand on the controls, me off-centre and the editing screen full face on him. Volunteer Boy with the right-on beads and less than a beard like he’s never going to grow up. But standing always and forever above me.

“I hadn’t thought of it before. There was no occasion to think about it. I assumed that the music would level us; two young men equal in front of the music, for the sake of getting it right.

“It wasn’t to be.

“That moment sparked in me the desire to burn these people and the flawless skin they come wrapped in. Daughters and sons who’ve never done anything wrong, of parents who’ve done everything right. read more

(1) Ariel Castro’s house on Seymour Avenue is ‘yet to give up its ghosts’ (May 2013 when his three women captives were first discovered). Today it is a ghost: there is a dark shadow haunting Lot 2207, imprisoned there by Google Earth which obliterated the house online before bulldozers moved in to finish the job.

(2) The white clapperboard house would have been a building block of the old Dream (built 1892). As featured in Walker Evans’ pioneering book of photographs-as-art (1938). But the American Dream – well, that’s what it always was. Evans’ most famous pic is the Pin-Up of the Dustbowl (the beautiful woman who would have been sexy, too, if she hadn’t been strung out by real hard times). Now on Seymour Avenue the old Dream Home is remade as nightmare; all the more dreamlike because it no longer exists

Dead ringer for Mr Tumnus, the faun in the original chronicle of Narnia, first seen carrying parcels and an umbrella through the snow covered forest. But this man first came to public attention amidst the blood and gore of the bombed Boston marathon. He is Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, the younger of two brother bombers (Tamerlan the elder was killed in a shoot-out with Boston police) whose face – cupid lips and curly hair – currently adorns the front cover of Rolling Stone.

‘Looking like the cover of a 20 dollar magazine….’

A kind and gentle face, apparently. The kind of pristine pretty boy face that teen girls like to imagine atop the mangled body of a motorbike casualty.

‘You get the picture? Yes, we do.’

Although the same photograph of Dzhokhar had already been used by the New York Times, Rolling Stone’s cover shot has been singled out for ‘glamorising terrorism’. Hardly the intention of investigative reporter Janet Reitman. She contrasts this hardly-more-than-a-boy with the cold killer he-turned-out-to-be, and tries to account for the transformation.

If Reitman is in the wrong for writing this feature, then so was Truman Capote; so too is almost every instance of long form journalism on cold blooded killing. Crime reporting is only acceptable if it trains a laser on the killer’s forehead (like the Boston police pics leaked in response to the cuddly cover shot). Surely not. But Rolling Stone does get it badly wrong by saying that Dzhokhar ‘fell into Radical Islam’ because he was ‘betrayed by his family’. Betrayed by rock’n’roll, more like.

Rock’n’roll: the mythology which allows disaffected young men to ‘Paint It Black’. The platform for playing at ultra-violet Alex and his Droogs a la Andrew Loog Oldham-era Rolling Stones. The space to be The Outsider, up to and including ‘Killing an Arab’ (The Cure carrying on like Albert Camus). read more

He lacks the headline features which mark out Motor City’s most famous front men: the elegance of Smokey Robinson; Stevie Wonder’s wraparound modernism (woven into his sharkskin suits; signed and sealed by sunglasses the blind boy wore but never saw).

At the microphone, Kevyn Orr looks like a backing singer; but he is the ‘emergency financial manager’ who took the lead when the City of Detroit filed for bankruptcy on Friday.

This is the city that built the cars that gave America wheels, and wrote the soundtrack to twentieth century social mobility in the form of Tamla Motown records. When he founded the label in 1959, ex-car worker Berry Gordy modelled his ‘Hitsville USA’ on the assembly line composed by Henry Ford and first aired at Ford’s Detroit factory.

Before the riots which broke out in 1967 – troops on the streets, 43 dead: with hindsight, the first casualties of early-onset deindustrialisation – Detroit City must have seemed like a fast track to the Great Society.

Tamla Motown’s Detroit sound had embodied the prospect of inner city blacks moving onwards and upwards; it also meant whites listening to black performers not for their ‘authenticity’ but because they were ‘mod’: more Mondrian than Mississippi (John Hurt).

But in 1972 Tamla outsourced itself to Los Angeles, city of suburbs. Released by Marvin Gaye a year earlier, ‘Inner City Blues’ (Panic is spreading/God knows where we’re heading) elegised the imminent demise of Detroit’s aspirations.

Though his home ground is a different Northern city – Chicago – Barack Obama serves as full realisation of the Tamla-World that Wasn’t-To-Be: the African-American president whose white shirts are brighter, his suits even sharper than JFK’s. Obama is Stevie-Wonder-in-the-White-House; he brings the elegance of Smokey Robinson into the Oval Office. But this is the West Wing transported into Dreamland. Detroit’s Kevyn Orr is the mundane reality – the stolid performer whose background in corporate revues and rescue packages should have condemned him to remain in the backline, instead of starring in Detroit’s farewell show. read more

Trayvon Martin was shot dead in February 2012 after George Zimmerman profiled him as a perp. Seconds later, according to his mother’s court testimony, Zimmerman was on the phone screaming for an ambulance: the shooter had modified the fatally wounded teenager’s profile from perp to victim.

Called as a prosecution witness in Zimmerman’s trial (on Saturday night a Florida jury acquitted him of second degree murder after a second day of deliberation), Rachel Jeantal, the 19-year-old friend that Martin was on the phone to shortly before Zimmerman shot him, testified that Martin had told her he was being followed by a ‘creepy-ass cracka’. Zimmerman’s Peruvian descent failed to show in Martin’s instant profile of him: the teenager already had him down as white fright, vigilante material.

Thankfully there are numerous episodes which overturn even the most prevalent profiles. The day after Zimmerman’s acquittal, in Pennsylvania a five-year-old girl was rescued from the clutches of a suspected paedophile by every cracker’s next worst nightmare – two black youths on their BMX-style bikes. But instead of everyone’s iPhone, they snatched Jocelyn Rojas back from the kidnapper and returned her to the bosom of her (pasty-white) mother.

In the UK the latest advert for McDonald’s plays on a similar role reversal. A black teenager and an elderly white man live in different worlds (from the music they listen to – dance band versus dancehall, to the way they hitch their trousers up or down). We are invited to profile them as cultural and/or natural enemies: mutual hostility is in their jeans if not in their genes – along the lines of ex-Marine Michael Caine warring with South London youth in the eponymous film Harry Brown. Only this movie, shot on an East London housing estate by advertising agency Leo Burnett, ends with a twist: sitting down at separate tables, teenager and pensioner clock each other enjoying their burger and fries. Across a crowded food outlet, their eyes meet in a moment of mutuality; against type, ‘we all have McDonald’s in common’. read more