The Windfall that Bhopal never got

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Aishwarya Rai announced yesterday that she will be the executive producer and star of a film dealing with the 1984 tragedy in Bhopal. As reported by emediawire.com:

The fiction feature film [titled “Windfall“], a murder mystery inspired by true events, is set mostly in present day America, with flashbacks to Bhopal. Movie is the story of a young womanÂ’s search for her father, a plant manager on duty the night of the disaster. Ms. Rai plays the lead role, Jasmine Singh, an Indian-American debutante born in Bhopal but raised in Beverly Hills.

“The story of the disaster in Bhopal is all too tragic,” said Ms. Rai. “But this film will be inspiring. The story of a young woman’s search for her father, the love story with her American fiancé and the issues she goes through as a survivor of the disaster – I simply had to be involved. And I hope the films’ success will draw attention to the need of victims in Bhopal, and to those everywhere who’ve suffered from injustice.”

“This is a heroic role, like Erin Brockovich, but on an epic scale – THE INSIDER meets TITANIC,” said producer Zachary Coffin. “Aishwarya was our first, last and only choice to play the lead, and I truly believe this will be the most inspiring performance of her career yet.”

The INSIDER meets TITANIC? Surely we can minimize the latter? The film will borrow facts from a non-fiction book, The Bhopal Tragedy: What Really Happened and What It Means for American Workers and Communities at Risk, by Ward Morehouse and Arun Subramaniam. The film is scheduled to be released in the fall of 2005.

Spitzer in a twist

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New York State Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, who has been a one man wrecking ball against the corrupt practices of big business the last couple years, will be featured tonight, on NOW with Bill Moyers in an episode titled Eliot Spitzer: “The Sheriff of Wall Street”.

As New York’s chief law enforcement officer, Elliot Spitzer has taken on the titans of Wall Street to get a fair deal for Main Street. His far-reaching investigations have uncovered fraudulent practices in some of the nation’s biggest companies and helped restore transparency and honesty to industries that provide important products and services to regular Americans-mutual funds, prescription drugs, insurance. On Friday December 3, 2004 at 9 p.m. on PBS (check local listings), NOW’s David Brancaccio goes inside the mind, motivations and investigations of one for the nation’s most feared and respected attorneys general, the man they call “the sheriff of Wall Street.”

In addition to taking on the Mutual Fund industry and other titans, Spitzer is also helping the little guys. In this case, Bagladeshi pretzel vendors in Central Park.

M&T Pretzel Inc., which owns more than half the pushcarts in Central Park, has agreed to pay $450,000 to settle labor law violations because it stiffed its workers on overtime or minimum wage.

Between 50 and 100 vendors who worked from 1999 to 2002 are expected to share in the settlement, said state Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, who announced the deal yesterday.

Most of the workers are Bangladeshi immigrants who have gone on to other jobs.

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Union Carbide hoaxer fools the BBC

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The BBC just had its own Dan Rather moment: a media hoaxer pretending to be from Union Carbide took full responsibility for the Bhopal disaster (via Sreenath Srinivasan):

The BBC had earlier twice run an interview with a man it identified as Dow Chemical spokesman Jude Finisterra, who said the company accepted full responsibility for the disaster 20 years ago in the central Indian city of Bhopal. This would have represented a major policy reversal for Dow Chemical which has said it has no responsibility for the Bhopal disaster… “We also confirm Jude Finisterra is neither an employee nor a spokesperson for Dow.”

Union Carbide accepting responsibility for Bhopal? The Beeb should’ve known that was completely implausible.

Checkmate cheating

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Filmmaker Vikram Jayanti’s documentary about the royal sport of chaturanga is coming to the U.S. Game Over: Kasparov and the Machine covers the famous chess match between Garry Kasparov vs. IBM’s famed supercomputer.

The film hints darkly at human-machine collusion in Deep Blue’s win. The filmmaker expands on his conspiracy theory:

IBM hit the jackpot. Their share value went up and up. And it strikes me that someone in the corporation had a brilliant idea that if they could beat Kasparov, people would think that IBM were in the frontline of computing. IBM was seen as a dinosaur before this match. No one saw them as an innovator. They’re still using Deep Blue in their advertising.

He sees Kasparov as a giant betrayed:

I’ve watched him play inferior players. He just wants to get it over with. I mean, when you’re that good at chess you want a good opponent. And I suspect his fantasy was that a computer would give him that… In terms of walking naively into the lions den, I think he thought there was a chance to make some money and to do something of scientific interest.

Jayanti throws in some puffery about the sport of chess, which apparently is as physically bad-ass as badminton claims to be:

I wanted it to be a combat film. One of the first things Garry said to me was, “Chess is a contact sport.” You know he’s very physically fit. And I asked him why he has to work out so much, and he told me that you had to be very fit in order to play.

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Bend it like Bangladesh

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A real-life case of Bend It Like Beckham has erupted in Bangladesh:

Bangladesh’s government has stopped women taking part in a swimming competition after pressure from an Islamic group. In July, a women’s wrestling tournament was cancelled after threats to disrupt it, and a women’s football competition was called off after protests… a radical Islamic group threatened to bring the entire district around Chandpur to a halt with protests… The Committee for Resistance to Un-Islamic Activities said women taking part in the sport would offend Bangladesh’s more than 100 million Muslims.

How could we ally with a country which bans Gabrielle Reece? Such an ally would be positively un-American. Next thing you know, they’ll ban women from driving.

Brimful of Reese’s on the 35

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Mira Nair waxes about Sapphic pleasures while discussing her Vanity Fair lead Reese Witherspoon’s pregnancy:

“[W]hen I first met her husband [actor Ryan Philippe], I said ‘knock her up, won’t you, I need some flesh on the girl’,” she joked. “I’m not a fan of the underfed Los Angeles actor at all… I love the luminosity that pregnancy brings, I love the fleshiness, I love the ample bosom – it gave me much more to play with.”

Sounds like she appreciates someone with a kachori in the oven. Nair managed to work around Reese’s pieces on screen:

Nair explained how camera tricks had been used to disguise Witherspoon’s “bump” in various scenes – including hiring a number of young boys in costumes to stand in front of her. “She runs, she gets off coal carts, she jumps off horses – she does everything,” Nair said. “But there’s also a certain carriage with horses that is going to wipe the screen at a certain moment, because of the bump.”

The artist formerly known as MC Hammer would’ve understood.

The poetry of racists

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A Sikh-owned gas station in Chesterfield, Virginia was burned and defaced with racist graffiti last week (via Prashant Kothari):

[T]he attackers put the gas station on fire on Wednesday and left after smearing the remaining property with graffiti containing ethnic slurs… The words “Go Back to Bin Laden B–” and “Never Again Indian Monkey N–” were sprayed on a dumpster in the rear of the gas station property. In addition, the words, “F– Arab Gas” were spray painted on the gas station’s shed… “Now they call us Osama bin Laden. In 1979, when Iranians held Americans hostage, they used to call us Ayatollahs,’ says Bammi.

I sure do miss the good ol’ days when the racists weren’t utterly ignorant. The thugs in Britain didn’t call you Eye-rainians, Eye-rackies (mortal enemies of the Eye-rainians) and bin Ladens (mortal enemy of the Eye-rackies) all at once. There was an intimacy to their taunting. And ‘Indian Monkey N–‘ is missing a few other ethnically-inaccurate insults. Is it too much to ask for my racism to be specific?

But ‘F– Arab Gas’ fills me with hope. Hope that they’re energy policy-conscious racist arsonists who want a self-reliant, muscular country which can’t be blackmailed over a non-indigenous resource. And curiosity about whether these gentlemen voted for Arab gas’ #1 friend.

Yep, I sure do miss the good ol’ days.

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Cow dung against nukes

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The intrepid and clever RSS glorifies the totemic Hindu animal by claiming cow dung protects against nuclear fallout (via Spontaneous Order):

Bhanwarlal Kothari, a senior member of the RSS, said, “Our tests have shown that distemper made out of cow dung and spread over walls and roofs can block nuclear radiation.”

But wait, cows also cure cancer…

“We believe that cows’ urine can cure cancer, renal failure, arthritis and a lot of other ailments,” Mansinghka said.

… dispose of biohazards…

“Some of my friends have (debated) ways to use cow dung to wrap surgically removed human body parts and bury them in the ground,” he said. “That will save hospitals the expensive process of incinerating such organs.”

… and cause earthquakes via ‘Einsteinian pain waves’:

“The killing of animals causes natural and manmade disasters,” Bajaj said. “But, since the cow is so useful to human beings, its slaughter causes exceptional seismic activity. The cries of the animals go down to the earth through Einsteinian pain waves.”

Clearly, we should be defending our soldiers in Iraq with nothing more than bull shit. All I’m saying is give pees a chance. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m getting some very non-Einsteinian pain waves in my cranium.

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Mr. Birdie Num-Num gets a biopic

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Many people look better in the animal wax of nostalgia: dictators, drugrunners, Starsky & Hutch. But one never does: Peter Sellers, the British comedian who made a habit of playing mentally-challenged desis in brownface.

The original film [The Party] was a more-than-a-little-racist comedy with a white comedian playing ‘Hrundi V. Bakshi’ in brownface, sporting a degenerate imitation of an Indian accent. Sellers wandered around a film set for a sequel to Gunga Din, itself a landmark of racism featuring civilized British soldiers vs. naked Indian savages.

Yes, Mr. Birdie Num-Num just got an HBO biopic, which means that Glitter has lost its lock on the Razzies. Even worse, Dreamworks is remaking The Party:

The Party, a minor success in comparison to Sellers films like Dr Strangelove and The Pink Panther, was banned in India for some years. Some politicians protested the film caricatured Indians and showed them in absurd light. Only after editor Khushwant Singh intervened was the ban lifted.

The only saving grace is that they’re making the protagonist non-desi.