“Forsaken Land” Forsaken

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Sulanga Enu Pinisa (The Forsaken Land), the Sri Lankan film that won the prestigious Camera d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, has apparently been withdrawn from screening in Sri Lanka (second article down).  The film opened on September 9, but was removed from Sri Lanka’s five main theaters by the National Film Corporation of Sri Lanka on September 20th.  The director and producer of the film then requested that the movie be withdrawn from the country’s remaining theaters in protest. 

While the Film Corporation claims that the film was withdrawn due to poor box office performance, the director of the film, Vimukthi Jayasundara, argues that it is a form of “unofficial censorship.”  According to the BBC Sinhala Website, the film was criticized by a senior officer of the Sri Lankan Navy:

Rear Admiral Weerasekera on September 25th in an article in the Sunday ‘Divaina’ has said that film producers should be labelled as terrorists and hanged.

The Sri Lankan media watchdog Free Media Movement additionally claims that Army officials made veiled threats against Sri Lankan filmmakers critical of the ongoing ethnic conflict:

An article published in an English language daily on 14 September 2005 indicated that films by prominent directors such as Asoka Handagama, Prasanna Vithanage, Sudath Mahaadivulwewa and Vimukthi Jayasundara have been labelled “new terrorism” and “foreign funded cinema” in statements attributed to a military spokesperson.

Articles written by military and political leaders criticizing anti-war films as propaganda for separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam have started to appear in mainstream newspapers.

In a meeting between two of the filmmakers and high military officials that took place subsequent to the publication of these articles, where they were asked whether they were willing to make films for military propaganda, the filmmakers were told that if war breaks out again they will face repercussions.

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The yellowcake affair

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An Asian-American college student cries brutha-on-brutha violence:

Who are Asian girls dating? Whites and South AsiansIn one of the discussion classes I taught last year at Berkeley, half of the Asian girls in the room stated that they do not prefer to date Asian men… who are they dating?… The most obvious [answer was] white men… The second most common answer from the girls was Indian men (South Asians).

… their responses centered around… economic status and physical attractiveness… the Asian girls said that both white men and Indian men in our society (especially here at Berkeley) were viewed as successful, intelligent, and confident….

… the girls said that they found these two groups of men to be physically attractive… My conjecture in this case would be that both groups tend to share the same sharp features (Greco-Roman noses/eyes) that the media tends to value.

… Asian women are “up for grabs”… Asian men are getting the axe on two levels here. First, they are only seen as being able to date their own kind… At the same time, their own kind, at an increasing rate, tends not to prefer them sexually. [Link]

… the Asian male as sexually impotent voyeur or pervert is a reoccuring icon, appearing throughout American cultural history and especially in film. Notable examples of this include Mickey Rooney in “yellowface” as the bucktoothed Japanese landlord who sneaks peeps at Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) or the pathetically asexual nerd Long Duk Dong in John Hughes’ adolescent classic Sixteen Candles (1984). [Link]

 
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Big one hits Kashmir

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A big earthquake epicentered in Kashmir hit northern India and Pakistan around 8:50 am local time. At 7.6 on the Richter scale, it’s bigger than the California quake of ’89 (7.1) which took down the upper deck of the Bay Bridge and sent cars plunging into the ocean.

A powerful earthquake centered in the Hindu Kush mountains of Pakistan on Saturday morning sent tremors across South Asia, killing more than 18,000 people… [Link]

The quake in Kashmir had a magnitude of at least 7.6. The epicentre was 80km (50 miles) north-east of Islamabad…

Two buildings of the Margalla Towers residential complex collapsed in [Islamabad]… there is a small hill of broken concrete over which and under which rescue workers are desperately trying to dig out survivors… In Indian-administered Kashmir, 157 civilians and 15 soldiers are confirmed dead and more than 600 people injured. [Link]

Qaiser Abbas, a receptionist in the building, said he was sitting in his office when the building suddenly began to shake. ”After five seconds, I heard big sound, and then about 40 apartments collapsed,” he said. He said some of the residents were foreigners, including Westerners and Central Asians. The building is in an upscale neighborhood of Islamabad…

”It was so strong that I saw buildings swaying. It was terrifying,” said Hari Singh, a guard in an apartment complex in the New Delhi suburb of Noida. Hundreds of residents there raced down from their apartments after their beds and couches started shaking. [AP]

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Life after Stiffness

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Over the past year, whenever the topic of books comes up, I grab whomever I am speaking to by the collar and hiss just one word: “Stiff.”  You have to read this book.  This is quite ironic since the person who finally gave me the book for my birthday tried unsuccessfully for about 6 months to get me to buy it on my own.  Who the hell would want to read a book about dead bodies?  The full title, “Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadaver,” is an entire book of non-fiction that pays homage (through use of a unique and witty brand of dark humor) to the unlikeliest of heroes:  the human cadaver (see previous SM post).  SM tipster Shailaja informs me that the author, Mary Roach, is following up her brilliant book with the most logical sequel possible.  The New York Times reviews SPOOK: Science Tackles the Afterlife:

Mary Roach’s journey into the occult takes her to as many strange places as she can scare up. Having written a humorous book about corpses (“Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers”), Ms. Roach has now ventured one step further into the unknown. On this new journey, she is supposedly searching for answers to life’s great questions about the migration of the soul. But readers of “Stiff” know what to expect: the author is looking for quacks.

Those quacks are sitting ducks for Ms. Roach’s fine-tuned sense of the absurd. So Ms. Roach studies ectoplasm, notes that it looks like woven material and learns of a researcher who in 1921 asked of disembodied spirits: “Have you a loom in your world?”

She visits India to look for firsthand evidence that spirits return. (This trip was worth it for the chapter title alone. It is called “You Again: A Visit to the Reincarnation Nation.”) She finds scientists who have identified the weight lost by a dying person and notes that a recent movie title used the metric version of that figure, “21 Grams.” (“Who’s going to go see a movie called ‘Point Seven Five Ounces’?” she asks.) She cites two Dutch physicists, J. L. W. P. Matla and G. J. Zaalberg van Zelst, and notes that one worked with a Ouija board. She hopes that “the question ‘What is my full name and that of my partner?’ was never posed.” And she digs up the fact that Elizabeth Taylor claimed to have had a near-death experience but was sent back to the land of the living by one of her husbands, Mike Todd, then adds: “Whether this was done for her benefit or his is not clear.”

I can’t wait.  Each chapter in Stiff can be read almost as an independent essay.  I assume she will follow this model for Spook as well.

In “The Ordinances of Manu,” a legal text based on Vedic scripture that dates to A.D. 500, she finds that a rogue Brahman may be forced to reincarnate as “the ghost Ulkamukha, an eater of vomit.”

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Do arranged marriages contribute to terrorism?

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Yes, I know.  That is probably an unnecessarily provocative title.  Still, it is a provocative issue I am about to broach.  Dave Sidhu at DNSI highlights a new report by UK Migration Watch  (which seems like a conservative independent think tank) that more politely asks the same question as the title of this post.  Here are the first two points from their summary:

1. International arranged marriages are a major factor in the formation of ghettoes in Britain. Even in the second generation, a high proportion of immigrants from certain countries enter arranged marriages with spouses from their county of origin. This sets back integration by a generation. The flow of spouses and fiancé(e)s from the Indian Sub Continent (ISC) doubled between 1996 and 2001. Now nearly half of ethnic Indian and three quarters of ethnic Pakistani and Bangladeshi children aged 0-4 have a mother born in her country of origin. 30% of all children born in Bradford are born to foreign mothers; in Tower Hamlets the figure is 68%. And the Pakistani population of Manchester, Birmingham and Bradford increased by about 50% between 1991 and 2001.

2. It is now essential that immigration policy should discourage international arranged marriage which has become a means of immigration. The present regulations should be tightened and a “family connection test” should be introduced, similar to that in force in Denmark. Where a UK resident wishes to marry a spouse from the country in which he or she (or either parent) was born, entry clearance to Britain should not be granted until both parties have reached the age of 24. The test would not apply to citizens of the EU who have a treaty right of entry nor to citizens of countries whose primary official language is English and thus do not pose an integration problem.

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Nanda wins ignominious Ig Nobel

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Mahatma Gandhi may never have won a Nobel, but Gauri Nanda makes it all ok.

The Ig Nobels are the Hasty Puddings of the science world. They’re given out for the most pointless or humorous scientific research, like one winning paper on how leeches react to beer and sour cream. (Like humans, I’m guessing they swell up and die.)

Nanda won last night for her annoying, you-must-get-out-of-bed alarm clock. She’ll make a perfect desi mom someday Congrats, Gauri!

ECONOMICS: Gauri Nanda of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, for inventing an alarm clock that runs away and hides, repeatedly, thus ensuring that people DO get out of bed, and thus theoretically adding many productive hours to the workday.

The 2005 Ig Nobel Prizes were awarded on Thursday evening, October 6, at the 15th First Annual Ig Nobel Prize Ceremony, at Harvard’s Sanders Theatre… [Link]

Note that last night was their 15th ‘First Annual’ ceremony, like it’s my friends’ tenth 21st birthdays  Here’s more on Nanda. Past South Asia-related winners:

MATHEMATICS: K.P. Sreekumar and the late G. Nirmalan of Kerala Agricultural University, India, for their analytical report “Estimation of the Total Surface Area in Indian Elephants…”

PHYSICS: Deepak Chopra of The Chopra Center for Well Being, La Jolla, California, for his unique interpretation of quantum physics as it applies to life, liberty, and the pursuit of economic happiness. [REFERENCE: Deepak Chopra’s books “Quantum Healing,” “Ageless Body, Timeless Mind,” etc.]…

PEACE: Lal Bihari, of Uttar Pradesh, India, for a triple accomplishment: First, for leading an active life even though he has been declared legally dead; Second, for waging a lively posthumous campaign against bureaucratic inertia and greedy relatives; and Third, for creating the Association of Dead People…

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Never a Nobel man

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While we’re in the thick of Nobel Prize season, Sree over at SAJA reminds us that the peace prize commitee never recognized Mohandas Gandhi, its greatest omission of all time:

… Reuters reported in early 1998 that the reason for not selecting the leader of India’s struggle for independence was Norway’s friendship with Britain after World War II. Hundreds of documents in a basement safe at the Nobel Institute in Oslo… showed that Gandhi was nominated but did not win in 1937, 1947 and 1948.

Historians say the five-man jury in the 1930s and ’40s was pro-British and had a patronizing attitude to candidates from the developing world. “If I were to guess, one factor which made it difficult to give the prize to Gandhi was the very strong pro-British orientation in Norway’s foreign policy,” said Geir Lundestad, director of the Nobel Institute. [Link]

Something is rotten in the state of Norway, and it ain’t just the lutefisk. The peace prize endowed by the inventor of dynamite later covered its ass with vim and bluster:

There is no hint in the archives that the Norwegian Nobel Committee ever took into consideration the possibility of an adverse British reaction to an award to Gandhi… when the Dalai Lama was awarded the Peace Prize in 1989, the chairman of the committee said that this was ‘in part a tribute to the memory of Mahatma Gandhi.’

… it seems clear that they seriously considered a posthumous award… they decided to reserve the prize, and then, one year later, not to spend the prize money for 1948 at all. What many thought should have been Mahatma Gandhi’s place on the list of Laureates was silently but respectfully left open. [Link]

It’s all clear now. They really did give it to Gandhi, see. In their heads. Without telling anyone. Poor Nobel committee, always on the wrong side of history. Then they gave Yasser Arafat the peace prize in 1994. Can you say ‘overcompensate’?

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A Mumbaikar on Delhi

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A Mumbaikar takes a dig at Delhi, where my family’s from, in a long-running intranational rivalry (thanks, Amardeep). It’s more bare-knuckled than Suketu Mehta’s usual measured style, I like.

Most Indians think about Delhi as a place where women are never completely safe, where the pollution is a large mattress over the city in the winter, and where crazed ministers’ sons pull out guns at the slightest provocation… [Link]

Of course, many Dilliwale think of Delhi quite prosaically as home, and of Bombay as debauchery central: gangsters, bar girls and filmi melodrama. For those stereotypes, we can thank Mr. Mehta

Many Indians, especially in the Northeast, consider it the citadel of the new Indian imperialism… Bombay and Delhi, in particular, have never quite adjusted to the fact that they share the same country. They are India’s New York and Washington, tolerating each other…

When people say nice things about Delhi, it is usually about North Delhi–a very Indian city, with Punjabi families living in ramshackle houses with multiple new additions, sitting on cots under tubelights thick with insects and the lizards feasting on them… [Link]

Or those compliments are about Delhi’s new subway.

I’ve spent many pleasant hours in barsaatis drinking cheap rum with expensively educated friends. And I’ve gone to many a cocktail party at Problem Row… the World Bank, the United Nations… Save the Children, where everybody discusses what problem they specialise in. “I’m in malaria, what about you?”…

Delhi, unlike Bombay, is not an island; people can live very far from their inferiors… I came to think of Delhi as an Endless City… When it is very quiet you can hear the screams of the slaughter of Timur the Lame, blending into the screams of the slaughter of the Sikhs just 21 years ago. [Link]

Melodramatic much? And when it’s quiet in Bombay, you can hear the whine of starlets. It’s blood-curdling, I tell you.

Here’s more on Timur Leng / Tamerlane, the sacking of Delhi and Timur’s capital city, Samarkand (now in Uzbekistan).

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“Anna asks. We write. Friday afternoon :)”

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Once upon a time…well, it was actually just a week ago, a beloved Sepia personality asked:

yay! I love Fast Fiction Fridays at the Mutiny. Can we do it again next week?

Of course we can, darling. “55 Fiction Friday” is a meme I’ve been faithful to for a while; I’m happy to infect the Mutiny with it.

For those of you who missed last week’s brilliance and have no idea what I’m going on about, the idea behind “Fast Fiction” is simple:

Flash fiction, also called sudden fiction, micro fiction, postcard fiction or short-short fiction, is a class of short story of limited word length. Definitions differ but is generally accepted that flash fiction stories are at most 200 to 1000 words in length. Ernest Hemingway wrote a six-word flash: “For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn.” Traditional short stories are 2,000 to 10,000 words in length…One type of flash fiction is the short story with an exact word count. An example is 55 Fiction or Nanofiction. These are complete stories, with at least one character and a discernible plot, exactly 55 words long.[wiki]

More than a few bloggers have been writing a piece of nanofiction every Friday, for weeks.

I was elated at the response that my post on this meme inspired– comment after comment containing perfect little gems of story– we’d be crazy NOT to create a tradition out of such goodness.

What goodness it was. By the time I closed comments at the end of the weekend (a practice I think I’ll continue), we were in the triple digits.

Umair made me lightheaded when he channeled the book I love most:

Transported back to 1951, the thought of making money by betting on cricket matches yet to happen was for some strange reason furthest from my mind, which should give you a sense of just how at home I felt with the whole affair. But then: “I wish she’d married either Kabir or Amit. . .”

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Mr. Fix-It

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Well, I’m up at the infamous North Dakota headquarters, and I have to say that from the brief glimpses I’ve managed to catch so far, it seems pretty swank. At the moment they’ve got me locked up in a crawlspace next to the Champagne Room with only a laptop to keep me company; it was a bit cramped at first, but now that I’ve cleared out the last of the empty kasippu bottles and deflated the dolls, things are starting to feel a bit more homey around here.

Being selected as the next Sepia Mutiny guestblogger is quite an honor for me; all day I’ve been trawling the internet in search of a fitting subject for my first post. I considered topics ranging from the upcoming Sri Lankan presidential election to an update on the guy who played Jawarharlal in the hit sitcom Head of the Class. Ultimately, I decided that it would be best to brush up on my acronyms before wading into the murky alphabet soup of Sri Lankan politics, and to hold off on the Jory Husain/Joher Coleman update pending further research.  Just as I began to despair of ever finding a suitable millionaire topic for my marriage post, the Mutineers presented me with that gift most treasured by desi bloggers the world over:  A Suketu Mehta article to blog about!

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