Indian Writing

‘Family values’ have prevented some families from seeing Omkara. Their loss.

I think the film was very well done. It had a few weaknesses, but on the whole it was full of passion, drama, breathtaking visuals… I didn’t care for the music, though. What I really liked was the narrative structure, the non-wedding at the beginning and the non-wedding at the end.

I won’t blog about the film because I’m writing about it elsewhere. I will say, though, that I agree with Neha’s take on the offensive remarks in this review.

And one last thing. My soft white cat called Bilkul - Billoo for short - will now be known as Billoo Chaman Bahar.

An essay in the New Yorker on citizen journalism:

Even at its best and most ambitious, citizen journalism reads like a decent Op-Ed page, and not one that offers daring, brilliant, forbidden opinions that would otherwise be unavailable. Most citizen journalism reaches very small and specialized audiences and is proudly minor in its concerns. David Weinberger, another advocate of new-media journalism, has summarized the situation with a witty play on Andy Warhol’s maxim: “On the Web, everyone will be famous to fifteen people.�

Reporting—meaning the tradition by which a member of a distinct occupational category gets to cross the usual bounds of geography and class, to go where important things are happening, to ask powerful people blunt and impertinent questions, and to report back, reliably and in plain language, to a general audience—is a distinctive, fairly recent invention…

A look at women’s issues around the world.

In Argentina, a rape victim abortion case polarises the country where terminations of pregnancy are mostly illegal.

Abortion is illegal in much of Latin America, home to half the world’s Catholics. In Argentina alone, between 500,000 and 700,000 clandestine abortions are practiced each year..

In Orissa, this rape-accused marries his victim “despite belonging to a different caste”, their “well-wishers hosted a grand feast”, and er, the accused now hopes that the complaint will be withdrawn.

It’s all really about withdrawing the complaints, isn’t it? In Bengal, this rape victim was offered a “compromise” by a bunch of village strongmen and allegedly urged to withdraw her complaint. When she refused, she was forced to flee her village.

Over 58000 cases of rape are pending trial in various courts in India.

Lisa Goldman writes:

The three brown boulders bridging the body of water that separates Tel Aviv from “the rest of the world” illustrate that, for all our ironic references to living in a bubble, it is impossible to ignore what is going on around us. We are all connected and the country is very small - we all have friends or family who live up north (just an hour or two away by car), or we know people who have fled the bombardment and become refugees, or we have relatives who are being called up for emergency army reserve service. We are all glued to the television and internet, constantly looking for news updates. ‘And we are all worried.

Mel Gibson. First he makes that awful movie. Then he gets drunk and drives, gets caught, makes a bunch of anti-Semitic and sexist remarks.

Are you in the habit of declaring, “The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world” when you get pie-eyed? Or simply of muttering, “Fucking Jews”? Or of asking your arresting officer, “Are you a Jew?” (Here Gibson revealed an anti-Jewish bigotry so all-consuming that he couldn’t even get his ethnic stereotypes straight. The Jews control international banking, Mel. It’s the Irish who control the police.)

For good measure, Gibson turned on a policewoman observing his meltdown and said, “What do you think you’re looking at, sugar tits?”

There’s a lot to dislike about Gibson. He is given to furious tirades against homosexuals of the sort that make one wonder if he has some kind of subliminal or “unaddressed” problem… He has told interviewers that his wife, the mother of his children, is going to hell because she subscribes to the wrong Christian sect (a view that he justifies as “a pronouncement from the chair”). And it has been obvious for some time to the most meager intelligence that he is sick to his empty core with Jew-hatred.

Update: Hitchens is really going after Gibson with hammer, tongs and characteristic bile, but for some perspective and context on his own attitudes, I was looking for the Vanity Fair article that Hitchens wrote some time ago… I had written about it in an earlier post. Here’s the article. Blech.