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Priya has emailed me to let me know that she has never been a political prisoner in a psychiatric institution; I have edited this page at her request.
Priya Reddy is an Indian (non-violent) anarchist, with US citizenship, based in New York. She is also known as “warcry”. Many anarchists are reticent about using their full names when they carry out political activities, largely because some of those activities may be illegal, but also due to the possibility of assassination (particularly in the USA). However, Priya has got more confident about using her real name in recent years (as I have found out from web searches).
I met Priya at the Earth First! Gathering in the summer of 2005. At that event, she showed some videos (on DVD) produced by her organisation, at that time called War Cry Independent Cinema, although they have since dropped the word Independent, in line with the domain name of the website www.warcrycinema.org. The most important of those videos showed her interviewing delegates entering the 2004 Republican Convention (shortly before the US presidential election that year in which George W Bush fraudulently defeated John Kerry as revealed on my us-electoral-fraud discussion group). She out-thought and exposed them extremely well, and also exhibited a sense of humour (a very important attribute of a political activist). She also presented at least one video produced by herself, demonstrating her very good abilities in that department.
I chatted with Priya shortly after she presented the videos (and on the odd other occasion during the Gathering I think). I was particularly impressed by the one about the Republican Convention, and asked if I could have a copy of it. She suggested I email her so that she could send me a copy, giving me the website address www.warcrycinema.org but warning me that it was at that time very basic. When I later went to the website, there was only one page, but I tried sending an email to the address warcrycinema@yahoo.com listed there and my message bounced back with an error indicating that the account had been disabled (presumably due to it not having been accessed for a while, although Yahoo! is a lot better than hotmail in that regard).
I also remember dancing with Priya one evening at the Gathering (although I danced with many others as I think she did too). I was certainly attracted to her physically, and found she had a kind personality, but it was her brilliant mind that particularly stood out in my memory of her.
I did not think of Priya much again until June 2006, when I included some verses for her in the first version of a political love song I wrote (which I have now called a “musical poem” since some lines are better spoken rather than sung) called “Couldn’t Wait Until Sunday”, mainly dedicated to the first serious love of my life Rhiannon Williams but also mentioning other people I would like in my band (then planned to be called Galaxia but I now prefer Red Day).
When I was revamping my (yet to be formed) band’s website www.galaxiamusic.org in early 2007, and started listing people I particularly wanted in the band, I pointed out that Priya’s video-making skills could make the difference between us being reasonably successful and an international phenomenon! This sound like an exaggeration but now that there are websites like YouTube which enable videos to be uploaded and seen by huge numbers of people, her participation could undoubtedly have a huge impact. If Priya could also play an instrument and/or sing, that would be even better!
A while later, I took a look at her website (www.warcrycinema.org) again and found some material on it, including some videos that could be downloaded or ordered (not including the Republican Convention one presumably because it could be dangerous to reveal how important Priya and her organisation is). When I tried the same email address as before, I once again got an error, but I spotted a different email address journalista1@yahoo.com, from which the website stated you could order videos. I soon realised that this had to be Priya’s email address, as the number one female journalist in the world!
However, based on failing to get a response from her and noticing that the website was still in quite a rudimentary state, I thought that she must be in deep trouble. [At first, a different website address (warcrycinema.blip.tv) mentioned on her Wikipedia page did not work, and I assumed it was an obsolete address, but I later found that it contained more recent information indicating that she had been free. The Wikipedia page has been badly edited; for a copy of the text on it I made in March 2008, click here.] I did some Google searches (and the suggestion to search for “warcry” as one word rather than two was very helpful), I discovered that Priya has quite a large web presence including a page at Wikipedia, and even a mention on that encyclopedia’s page for “war cry”. Having endured large parts of the last nine years as a political prisoner on psychiatric wards, including at present with some periods of leave, as I have documented on my Disability & Mental Health page, I suspected that she was encountering the same problem. If she had been in jail or died instead, I am sure I would have discovered that by doing those searches.
At the end of May 2007, I wrongly came to the conclusion that Priya was a political prisoner based on statistics about my websites.
I had written a political love song for Priya, called “Belly of the Beast” (with lyrics available here and recordings as musical poems in WMA and MP3 formats) and uploaded them to my websites shortly beforehand, and I believed this helped activists who know Priya believe that she was a political prisoner rather than mentally ill (neither of which is the case as I now know).
Partly because I have strong loving feelings for Priya, but also because I wanted to help her escape her supposed ordeal and because I believed that her life could even be in danger, I have set up this web page (and highlighted it with “warcry”
