Shunya's Notes

Bollywood's India

Here is a lecture on Bollywood by Rachel Dwyer, Prof of Indian Cultures and Cinema at the University of London (Nov 09). You may find it worth watching for its sociological insights, or even just to learn what a leading scholar of Bollywood now says about "Hindi cinema as a guide to modern India" in under an hour (rest is Q&A). For South Asians, a bonus might be the many nostalgia-inducing clips from old Hindi movies. (Bollywood scholarship is apparently hot, says this article.)

"Final Solution" by Rakesh Sharma

The 2002 communal riots in Gujarat may well go down as the darkest chapter in the first decade of 21st century India. An estimated two thousand Muslims were murdered, many burned alive. But what makes this a particularly dark event is the fact that it was methodically planned ahead and actively supported by the state government of the Hindu nationalist party BJP, led by Narendra Modi, still popular and in command in Gujarat. As this Human Rights Watch report, published a month later, notes: 

Between February 28 and March 2 the attackers descended with militia-like precision on Ahmedabad by the thousands, arriving in trucks and clad in saffron scarves and khaki shorts, the signature uniform of Hindu nationalist-Hindutva-groups. Chanting slogans of incitement to kill, they came armed with swords, trishuls (three-pronged spears associated with Hindu mythology), sophisticated explosives, and gas cylinders. They were guided by computer printouts listing the addresses of Muslim families and their properties, information obtained from the Ahmedabad municipal corporation among other sources, and embarked on a murderous rampage confident that the police was with them. In many cases, the police led the charge, using gunfire to kill Muslims who got in the mobs' way. A key BJP state minister is reported to have taken over police control rooms in Ahmedabad on the first day of the carnage, issuing orders to disregard pleas for assistance from Muslims. Portions of the Gujarati language press meanwhile printed fabricated stories and statements openly calling on Hindus to avenge the Godhra attacks.

In almost all of the incidents documented by Human Rights Watch the police were directly implicated in the attacks. At best they were passive observers, and at worse they acted in concert with murderous mobs and participated directly in the burning and looting of Muslim shops and homes and the killing and mutilation of Muslims. In many cases, under the guise of offering assistance, the police led the victims directly into the hands of their killers. Many of the attacks on Muslim homes and places of business also took place in close proximity to police posts. Panicked phone calls made to the police, fire brigades, and even ambulance services generally proved futile. Many witnesses testified that their calls either went unanswered or that they were met with responses such as: "We don't have any orders to save you"; "We cannot help you, we have orders from above"; "If you wish to live in Hindustan, learn to protect yourself"; "How come you are alive? You should have died too"; "Whose house is on fire? Hindus' or Muslims'?" In some cases phone lines were eventually cut to make it impossible to call for help.

I had long heard of Rakesh Sharma's Final Solution, the acclaimed documentary film about the riots. A few months ago I found it on Google Video and I can't praise it enough. It is an outstanding record that expanded my understanding of the riots—from the political rallies before the riots, to the minds of the Hindutva ideologues, to their many grassroots organizations in the Sangh Parivar. Using eyewitness accounts, Sharma reveals how the events then unfolded, how the madness spread, and the stories of the people caught in its wheels. A must see for anyone interested in the politics of hate that grips humanity from time to time (duration: 150 mins).

The Century of the Self

Watch this remarkable BBC documentary by Adam Curtis, The Century of the Self. It examines how those in power in the last century—including PR professionals and politicians—exploited Freudian insights into human nature to make money, engineer consent, and manage the masses. It raises profound questions about the "Self" that we all believe we inhabit and shape ourselves, the tectonic shift occurring in our roles from citizens to consumers, and its implications for Anglo-American democracy. It looks at the routine use of focus groups to classify consumer demographics in a culture of increasingly self-absorbed individuals and "shows how by employing the tactics of psychoanalysis, politicians appeal to irrational, primitive impulses that have little apparent bearing on issues outside of the narrow self-interest of a consumer population." It also has some rare archival footage. (Thanks to my friend Louise Gordon.)

Read more here. Below is part 1, here are part 2, part 3, and part 4, each about an hour long. It's well worth the time!

View More Free Videos Online at Veoh.com

A Folk Singer from Himachal

Here is a folk singer I recorded in May 2005 in the highlands of Khajjiar, Himachal Pradesh, India. He sings in a language called Pahari, derived from Sanskrit and Prakrit, with many dialects across the Himalayan belt. We were near the town of Chamba, so this particular dialect is probably Chambiali, though I can't be certain. I speak Hindi, also with roots in Sanskrit, so I can make out many words—enough to say that he is addressing his beloved in the first song and his attachment to place in the second—but not enough to translate (any Pahari speakers reading this?). Such are the myriad indigenous musical forms that globalization will probably make extinct in the years ahead.

Avatar: A Review

By Usha Alexander

I look for the same strengths and value in science fiction as I do in any other kind of film. But I don't care for macho, action-adventure films; I absolutely avoid them. Avatar is an action-adventure science fiction film. But it's not macho. Which is not to say it doesn't include some macho characters. I hope the difference is obvious.

James Cameron has long been recognized as the rare writer-director whose blockbuster vision allows as much value and presence to his female characters as to his male characters. Whatever the general merits of his previous films, The Terminator, Rambo II: First Blood, The Abyss, and The Titanic, one thing they can't reasonably be accused of is celebrating the masculine at the expense of the feminine. It's not only that his strong, brave, intelligent, and resourceful lead characters, Sara Connor (Linda Hamilton, The Terminator 1984) and Lindsey Brigman (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, The Abyss 1989), are two among the spare handful of feminine hero(in)es one finds at all in science fiction films. It's not just that his male characters are full enough to encompass the feminine, as when he shows us Rambo (Sylvester Stallone, Rambo II 1985) crying, even succumbing to the wilderness of his grief, driven by his heart as much as his head, or as when he casts the romantic hero of The Titanic (Leonardo DiCaprio, 1997) as a man who runs from a fight, preferring to sketch pictures, instead. Cameron not only doesn't flinch from femininity or see it as weakness in opposition to masculinity, he seems hardly to notice the divide, and that's what allows his characterizations to feel natural and authentic.

Avatar is, in many ways, a larger film than any of his others. Probably his magnum opus. Outlandishly expensive to make, visually almost revolutionary, and politically loaded, Cameron took every risk with this film. Cameron is notorious for his brash ego. But it's possible no humbler person might have dared this production and this story. And what did he give us, after all? A heroic fantasy of White Guilt. The story of Pocahontas, re-imagined.

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The story of Pocahontas is rooted in historical events, though few details are actually known. It is generally known that Pocahontas was one name of a daughter of Powhatan, the primary chief of a confederacy of Algonquin-speaking tribes in what is today Virginia, in the southeastern United States. She met the Englishman John Smith in 1607, when she was probably between 10 and 13 years old, while Smith was helping to establish Jamestown, the first successful English colony in North America. Smith later recounted to Queen Elizabeth that Pocahontas had intervened to save his life when her father's people captured and tried to kill him. Pocahontas befriended the colonists in Jamestown, and even saw to it that they were provisioned with food when they were starving, earning herself great respect among them. In 1609, Smith returned to England. In 1613, Pocahontas was taken captive by the English, who hoped to exchange her for weapons which her father had stolen from them. Her father ultimately did not make the ransom. Pocahontas rebuked her father for abandoning her, married an English tobacco farmer, becoming Rebecca Rolfe, and went with him to England in 1616. She died of illness on a boat the following year, when returning to the colonies. She was survived by her son, Thomas Rolfe.

There's neither evidence that Pocahontas ever saw Smith again after he'd left the Jamestown colony, nor that they ever had any kind of sexual relationship, though Smith did express to the Queen a degree of respect and affection toward her. Meanwhile, the toehold that colonial powers had gained in Jamestown grew and strengthened. By the mid-1600's, Powhatan's people were largely destroyed by European diseases and warfare. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Dance to Change the World

At TEDIndia, Mallika Sarabhai, a dancer, actor, and politician, tells a transformative story in dance—and argues that the arts may be the most powerful way to effect change, whether political, social or personal. Sarabhai played Draupadi in Peter Brook's Mahabharata.

The Truth About Burning Man

Jay Michaelson's take on the famous event held each year in the Black Rock Desert, Nevada:

You don't get it. You don't get what it's like to have 50,000 people circle around a wooden effigy, with 1000 people spinning fire and 500 more playing drums, all encircled by 200 art cars -- and then all roaring in unison as the effigy is set afire. You might think you get it, and it may scare or tempt or delight you, but I assure you, you don't get it. None of us do, because it's not about any one thing in particular; "it" can be an orgiastic celebration, or the sad mourning of a lost loved one. Or a warm, hippie-like community. Or a mean, Mad-Max-like apocalypse. "It" is chiefly a space in which all these things are possible.

The temporary erasure of societal, social, and personal boundaries is, for most of us, terrifying. Such boundaries help build the structures of society and self; they give form to human life, which is often chaotic and unpredictable. Thus they have been the bedrock of religious and civil life for millennia, even before the Furies were imprisoned under Athens, and Moses descended from Sinai.

But if religion creates boundaries, mysticism and spirituality efface them. In the transcendence of ordinary distinctions, peak experiences such as those encouraged at Burning Man give a glimpse of the ultimate, the infinite. It may seem absurd to suggest that Burning Man is a mystical event. But then, if it's just a big party, why is there a temple in the middle of it?

More here. Is that the whole truth? Check out a contrasting view in the comments section. I have never attended myself.
(Photo sources: one, two, three)

The Dark Side of the Moon

Go see the movie Moon. I rarely watch, let alone recommend, science fiction, but this one felt close to the classics of the genre, such as 2001, Blade Runner, and Solaris. What do they have in common? They're less about exploring outer space than the inner one, less about the gee-whiz-bang of science & technology than what it means to be human. Moon raises questions of identity, loneliness, corporate greed, and bioethics, with haunting landscapes and music to boot. No gratuitous explosions, crashes, chases, laser guns, femme fatales, or superheroes saving the day for planet earth. Instead, it offers a slow and deliberate unfolding of character through crisis—the crisis of self-discovery.

Food, Inc.

If you see only one documentary this summer, make it Food, Inc. Here is Roger Ebert's review, and the first 3-1/2 minutes of it.

The next time you tuck into a nice T-bone, reflect that it probably came from a cow that spent much of its life standing in manure reaching above its ankles. That's true even if you're eating the beef at a pricey steakhouse. Most of the beef in America comes from four suppliers.

The next time you admire a plump chicken breast, consider how it got that way. The egg-to-death life of a chicken is now six weeks. They're grown in cages too small for them to move, in perpetual darkness to make them sleep more and quarrel less. They're fattened so fast they can't stand up or walk. Their entire lives, they are trapped in the dark, worrying.

All of this is overseen by a handful of giant corporations that control the growth, processing and sale of food in this country. Take Monsanto, for example. It has a patent on a custom gene for soybeans. Its customers are forbidden to save their own soybean seed for use the following year. They have to buy new seed from Monsanto. If you grow soybeans outside their jurisdiction but some of the altered genes sneak into your crop from your neighbor's fields, Monsanto will investigate you for patent infringement. They know who the outsiders are and send out inspectors to snoop in their fields.

Food labels depict an idyllic pastoral image of American farming. The sun rises and sets behind reassuring red barns and white frame farmhouses, and contented cows graze under the watch of the Marlboro Cowboy. This is a fantasy.

A Treasure Trove of Archival Footage from Around the World

I recently came across a YouTube channel, the Travel Film Archive, with over 300 short videos featuring archival footage from around the world, from the city streets of Trinidad, 1938, to the Ituri Forest in Africa, 1929; from the New York subway, 1905, to the Sahara Desert, 1953, or Sri Lanka, 1932. Much of the footage is silent, with only title frames to describe the location or action, but some is accompanied by documentary style voiceover. One James A. Fitzpatrick, something like the Rick Steves of his day, is a frequent narrator.

The footage itself, along with the commentary, is a fascinating glimpse into the past, a window on how people lived 60 or 90 years ago. We see bits of fading or vanished cultural practices in their local context, from a time when they were still real: Native Americans in Idaho in full feathered regalia, participating in a drumming ceremony; Australian Aborigines painted in white stripes, throwing boomerangs; Alpine Germans carving wood and staging the Passionsspiele; young Tahitian women dressed to pass as their French colonizers; life in a Sinhalese village, when coconut was king and people remained happily unfettered by excessive clothing.

Though the commentary will strike the modern viewer as naive, amusing, or poorly informed about the world (perhaps even offensive), one can't also help but be impressed by the boldness of those who endured the foreign climates and conditions, huge heavy cameras in tow, to learn something about other peoples and produce what's clearly meant to be a mind-expanding educational experience for the millions back home, who would never in their lifetimes have opportunity for such adventure themselves. The power of such films to transport us and bring us the mysteries of the world today is damped by the ubiquity of images and information. But I imagine that in their day, these gems must have gone some way toward enriching the lives and minds of their viewers.

The collection also provides a window on how Westerners (mostly Americans, here, it seems) thought of Others in those days, how little they saw as they looked on so earnestly. What struck me generally, as I watched and sampled many videos, was the way that things have changed as much as they have remained the same.

The full range of videos is definitely worth perusing. Here are a few random highlights that may be of interest to readers of this blog: