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]]> http://asianwindow.wordpress.com/2009/01/01/4972/feed/ 0 asianwindow awheader http://asianwindow.wordpress.com/2008/12/31/salman-rushdie-provoking-people-is-in-my-dna/ http://asianwindow.wordpress.com/2008/12/31/salman-rushdie-provoking-people-is-in-my-dna/#comments Wed, 31 Dec 2008 04:39:47 +0000 asianwindow http://asianwindow.wordpress.com/?p=4966 ]]> Twenty years after the Ayatollah Khomeini called for his execution, Salman Rushdie is still alive – and still making enemies. John Preston in the Telegraph:

A car pulls up outside a Georgian house in Soho. Out steps Salman Rushdie. He’s dressed entirely in black – black overcoat, black scarf, black jacket, black sweater, trousers, shoes… The only thing not completely black is his shirt and that’s only because it’s got a few white stripes on it. He looks – actually, he looks just like a hit-man.

In his hand he carries a polythene bag full of books. When he comes upstairs, I find myself peering through the opaque plastic trying to make out the titles. One of them turns out to be the French version of his last novel, The Enchantress of Florence – now out in paperback. The book, declares Rushdie with satisfaction, has done terrifically well in France, getting ‘the sort of rave reviews you find yourself making up in the bath’.

Over here, it had a more mixed reception, but then, as Rushdie says of himself, ‘I’m not the sort of writer who ever gets five out of 10 reviews. I tend to get 11 out of 10, or minus one out of 10. That’s all right, though; it shows that people are having strong reactions.’

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Having predicted that Kashmiris would boycott the election, Indian liberals are now urging the government to act to resolving the Kashmir issue with some sort of geographical solution.

They are wrong.

Elections are the solution. Secular democracy is the only goal: It is what Pakistan’s founder Muhammad Ali Jinnah wanted. Kashmiris already have that.

When elections were announced on October 19, Kashmir’s leaders thought they would fail, given the heat generated over the failed transfer of land to the Amarnath Shrine, and the Hurriyat Conference’s boycott.

Few believed the elections would be this successful: The highest polling at 69 per cent, the lowest at 55 per cent.

The communist Yusuf Tarigami said “elections were no solution to the Kashmir problem”.

The secular Yasin Malik said his group, the JKLF, would campaign actively “to boycott the elections (which) was every Kashmiri’s right”.

Sheikh Abdullah’s grandson Omar said his party, the National Conference, would contest, but he worried that “turnout would be low”.

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When the gunfire started at Mumbai’s main train station last month, Sebastian D’souza was well placed to respond. From his office directly across the street, D’souza, the photo editor of The Mumbai Mirror newspaper, grabbed his Nikon and two lenses and headed out into the blood-soaked night of Nov. 26. Peering from behind pillars and running in and out of empty train cars, he emerged with the singular iconic image of the attacks: a clear shot of one of the gunmen.

“I was shaking, but I kept shooting,” D’souza said as he scrolled through his pictures of the attacks in a recent interview at his office.

D’souza’s photo of Muhammad Ajmal Kasab confidently striding through Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus carrying an assault rife with one hand, finger extended toward the trigger, has been printed and reprinted in newspapers here and flashed daily on television screens.

Four weeks after the terrorist rampage that left more than 160 people dead, the memories of victims are blurring. Some witness accounts remain contradictory. But D’souza and another newspaper photographer, Vasant Prabhu, have millions of pixels of evidence that will remain part of the indelible record.

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Students at St. Paul's Minor Seminary in the Irinjalakuda Diocese in India taking a ministry trip. [NYTimes photo

In the sticky night air, next to a grove of mahogany trees, nearly 50 young men in madras shirts saunter back and forth along a basketball court, reciting the rosary.

They are seminarians studying to become Roman Catholic priests. Together, they send a great murmuring into the hilly village, mingling with the Muslim call to prayer and the chanting of Vedas from a Hindu temple on a nearby ridge.

Young men willing to join the priesthood are plentiful in India, unlike in the United States and Europe. Within a few miles of this seminary, called Don Bosco College, are two much larger seminaries, each with more than 400 students.

As a result, bishops trek here from the United States, Europe, Latin America and Australia looking for spare priests to fill their empty pulpits. Hundreds have been allowed to go, siphoning support from India’s widespread network of Catholic churches, schools, orphanages, missionary projects and social service programs.

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The book tells you that one cannot be “ashamed” in Parliament and cannot address a lady presiding officer as “beloved”. Neither can one simply say “hello” to catch the chair or Speaker’s attention.

Among the more touchy and no-no phrases: “foreign money”, “true colours”, “for Christ’s sake”.  And some surprisingly unparliamentary expressions include expressions that are commonly used such as delusion of grandeur, clients, barbarian, common sense, fathers-in-law, joke, giggle, laugh and malpractices.

And in the din of Parliament if one suspects that the presiding officer is not listening to him, he cannot complain, “you are not listening to us”.

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An imagined conversation between Tariq Ali and Benazir Bhutto.

By Maniza Naqvi

Act I: The Leftist and the Leader:

Scene/Stage: There is a screen at the back of the stage which plays the clip, of General Zia-ul-Haq, declaring Martial Law, on July 5, 1977.

When the speech ends, two spot lights have searched, found and trained themselves on two people on the stage. Two actors playing Tariq Ali and Benazir Bhutto stand a couple of feet apart from each other. They are a young Tariq Ali, in jeans and a young Benazir Bhutto also in jeans. Tariq Ali, stands, legs apart, and grabs his head in anger and frustration. Benazir crouches—holds her head and then reaches out her arms as though reaching for someone in grief and pain.

TA: Arghhhhhhhhhhh

BB: ———Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhhhhhhhhh.

Stage darkens.

Lights go up. In the middle of the stage, there are two podiums at a short distance from one another. Tariq Ali stands at one and Benazir at the other. Benazir wears a white dupatta covering her head -and a green colored shalwar-kameez. Tariq Ali is dressed the same way as before, in jeans. They have their backs to the audience and they face two screens at the back of the stage. In the foreground there is a single chair.

The screen in front of Benazir shows one of her typical political rallies. There are massive jubilant crowds of people waving banners and chanting slogans. The screen in front of Tariq Ali shows either at a clip of a talk, or Tariq Ali leading the February 2003 anti war demonstrations.

There is the sound of people cheering and shouting her name. Her fists punch the air she makes movements that show that she is delivering an impassioned speech. There are cheers and slogans in both crowds. Benazir and Tariq Ali turn away from the screens and look at the audience and then turn around to face each other. They stand for a moment just looking at each other. Benazir adjusts her dupatta, in her characteristic way with both her hands. She moves forward away from the podium waving. A flash goes off-from a camera-then another and another. With each pop of the flash, the sound gets louder, till it segues into the sounds of explosions and gunshots.

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What could be more precious than gifting your unborn child a way to fight blood, genetic and immune system diseases for the rest of his or her life? Sure enough, many Indians are waking up to the magic of stem cell banking.

“Already 300 people have approached us for information on stem cell banking,” said V.R. Chandramouli, managing director of Europe’s largest stem cell banking company, Cryo-Save, which launched operations in India in December. The company obviously realises the huge potential in this business in India. It has invested over Rs.10 million in 10 stem cell storage banks opened this month.

A couple of companies in India were already dealing with stem cell banking like LifeCell, Chennai; and Reliance Life Sciences. Stem cells from umbilical cord blood are collected at the time of delivery when the cord connecting the baby to mother is cut.

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With Hollywood hitting up comic books for blockbusters, a new comics publisher is looking to India for ideas. “The world is increasingly realizing that India is a source for creativity and great ideas, not just a back office to execute them more cheaply,” said Gotham Chopra, part of the management team at Los Angeles-based Liquid Comics.

One of the first projects for the publisher will be bringing its Ramayan 3392 AD (pictured) – a colorful, 21st-century re-imagining of Indian literary epic the Ramayana – to movie theaters. Liquid has teamed up with Mandalay Pictures and 300 producer Mark Canton for the film, which has a planned release date of 2011.

Chopra talked with Wired.com about Liquid’s birth, a new wave of Indian comics artists and the challenge of bringing an ancient Sanskrit epic to the silver screen.

Wired.com: Condensing the Ramayana into a comic book must have been hard, but condensing it into a film seems harder. What do you think about the challenge, and how do you think it will do with audiences unfamiliar with the venerable narrative’s mythology?

Gotham Chopra: Can you say, “Trilogy?” Seriously, this is something we’ve talked about at length even in relation to the original comic series. Obviously, our goal is to create a narrative structure that doesn’t require a familiarity with the original story. That’s an important note, not only so that people who have never heard of Ramayan can enjoy it, but also so those who are familiar with it are not offended by the film.

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Every morning at 11am, a group of schoolchildren gather in a slum in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, to sing not one national anthem, but two.

First, the students at the Non-Local Surovi School raise their shrill voices in homage to Bangladesh, then to Pakistan. Yet they are citizens of neither country: they are among 250,000 Urdu-speakers who were disenfranchised when Bangladesh won its independence from Pakistan in 1971.

For 37 years now, the Muslim community which migrated here at the partition of British India in 1947 has existed in legal limbo and squalor in camps around Bangladesh. Today, however, its members will vote for the first time in parliamentary elections after a court decision that finally recognised their right to Bangladeshi citizenship.

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To Faisal Devji, Gandhi is the embodiment of a kind of humanitarian sacrifice, and ‘would probably have welcomed the comparison between his methods and those of Osama bin Laden, whose practices he might have seen as the evil perversion of his own.’ Courtesy Corbis

The field of jihadi studies, situated at the crossroads of policy-making, intelligence work, journalism and academic research, sprang up almost overnight following the attacks of September 11. It now boasts all the infrastructure that comes with the discovery of a glittering new frontier, as fascinating in its way as superstrings or Martian ice. Conferences, courses and research centres are devoted to explaining the intricacies of holy war. Amidst this mushroom patch of interlocking institutions and individuals, the work of Faisal Devji – an assistant professor at the New School for Social Research in New York – sticks out like a rare flower. Devji’s studies, which focus on the doings and sayings of al Qa’eda, are so at odds with what passes for common sense in this field that one sometimes wonders if he isn’t merely thumbing his nose at received wisdom. In his latest book, The Terrorist in Search of Humanity, he suggests that al Qa’eda has in some sense inherited the legacy of Mahatma Gandhi. He also argues that the ideology of jihad is a “humanitarian” one, and that the militants of al Qa’eda are “the intellectual peers” of environmentalists and pacifists. What does he mean by such provocations?

The Terrorist in Search of Humanity is in many ways a sequel to Devji’s equally provocative 2005 book, Landscapes of the Jihad. In that work, rather than concentrating on the spectacular violence that has been the focus of most experts, Devji argues that al Qa’eda’s real achievement is to have created “a new kind of Muslim”, one whose attachments to the traditions and institutions of Islam are radically unlike those of his predecessors. The new militancy cannot be understood by inserting it into a now-familiar history of Islamic extremism (Wahhabism, Sayyid Qutb, the Taliban, etc.), because what is significant about the jihadis of today is their relation to the present, or even to the future. “Al Qa’eda’s importance in the long run,” Devji writes, “lies not in its pioneering a new form of networked militancy… but instead in its fragmentation of traditional structures of Muslim authority within new global landscapes.”

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Stalking India’s Hemis National Park, an extremely rare snow leopard lives up to its name in U.S. photographer Steve Winter’s award-winning National Geographic magazine image.

On October 30, 2008, “Snowstorm Leopard” was named best overall photo in the 2008 Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition, organized by the Natural History Museum of London and BBC Wildlife Magazine.

Click here for more of the best photos of 2008

Dev Patel and Freida Pinto in Slumdog Millionaire

Slumdog Millionaire has a pedigree. Its director, Danny Boyle, says there are at least three Bollywood films that inspired him directly. Those films were themselves influenced by a long family tree that stretches back to the last days of the nineteenth century.

Here, then, is a list of Slumdog’s ten most flamboyant and influential Bollywood ancestors:

Black Friday (2004). This film, by young director Anurag Kashyap depicts the March 1993 bomb blasts that tore apart Bombay (as Mumbai used to be called). It was based on a book by journalist S. Hussain Zaidi and filmed in an edgy, realistic style. A famous sequence from the film, a 12-minute police chase through the crowded Dharavi slum, is mimicked by Danny Boyle in the opening scene of Slumdog Millionaire, where truant slum-kids take the place of Black Friday’s militants.

Satya (1998) a.k.a The Truth. This film was also cited by Boyle as an inspiration, as was The Company (2002). Both offer slick, often mesmerizing portrayals of the Mumbai underworld. Both films were directed by Ram Gopal Varma, a director with a fine taste for brutality and urban violence. The screenplay for Satya was co-written by Saurabh Shukla (who plays a policeman named Srinivas in Slumdog Millionaire) and Anurag Kashyap, who directed Black Friday; with its intense rhythm and captivating performances, Satya instantly became a contemporary classic in India.

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Legend has it that Moses, the most important prophet of the Jews and a significant religious leader for Christians and Muslims too, was ordered by God to deliver the Hebrews from slavery during Biblical times. Moses is said to have fulfilled his task by leading the slaves out of Egypt through the Red Sea and received the 10 Commandments. Rabbi Shimon Rosenberg believes that just as the prophet emerged from the water, his two-year-old grandson Moshe, which is Hebrew for Moses, miraculously emerged unscathed from fire-the 26/11 Terror attack on Chabad House in Mumbai in which Moshe’s parents Rivki and Gavriel Holtzberg were killed along with four other Jews.

The comparisons to divinity don’t end there. Rabbi Moshe Kotlarsky, the New York-based global chairman of the Conference of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, stops by in Afula in northern Israel on his way to Mumbai, carrying loads of goodies for the chubby little boy who now lives here with his grandparents. Among them is a stuffed-toy version and a holy scripture version of the Torah, the most holy of the sacred writings of Judaism, believed to have been authored by Moses. “When Moshe grows up, I want him to return to Mumbai,” says his grandfather. “And do what his father was doing, helping people without discriminating between them by their religion, colour or nationality.”

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Bollywood is fast becoming a new kind of outsourcing destination for the western world: pale flesh. Casting agents are scouring the region to find foreigners for movies requiring international locales, themes and sets.

As these movies require sizeable casts of Caucasoid characters for their imaginary discotheques, British soldiers in period films and Hare Krishna converts, production crews are zeroing in on anyone remotely filling the bill.

That is increasingly including a flock of beauties of indeterminate nationality and ethnic background. Katrina Kaif, a fast-rising starlet who has achieved considerable success in the three years since her debut, has a Kashmiri Muslim father and an English mother. Barbara Mori, of Uruguayan-Japanese and Mexican descent, is starring opposite to Hrithik Roshan in “Kites.” Tania Zaetta is an Australian who earlier appeared in “Baywatch” and “Who Dares Wins” and is now starring in Hindi movies. Yana Gupta is a Czech.

Other sourcing countries for these part-time actors are Pakistan, Bangladesh, Czech Republic, Norway, South Africa, Serbia, US, Britain and Thailand. Many Indians raised abroad too are looking to Bollywood as a passport to fame.

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“The divorce case is very, very common. If you go to the court, you will see most of the cases are all on divorce.”

It may sound like a comment from Scandinavia – but this is Bhutan and the speaker is a young artist, Barun Gurung. His own parents divorced 10 years ago, when he was 13 and his brother a little older.

“I think during their marriage they used to have small fights which, you know, used to have bad impact on us,” he told the BBC.

“They used to fight and you know my father used to put hands on my mother. So it was quite bad to see that.”

We meet in the studio where Barun works – a collective of artists in the Bhutanese capital, Thimphu, its walls plastered with brightly coloured pictures.

At least one of his colleagues joins in the conversation saying he, too, comes from a family affected by divorce. Marriage break-ups are common in this tiny kingdom. So, too, are love marriages, not arranged by one’s family.

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At the Juhu Marriott, one of the fanciest five-star hotels in Mumbai, frenzied preparations are underway for the big night.

Labourers here are working overtime, hanging streams of flower garlands and assembling chairs to get the finishing touches ready for the evening wedding celebrations, due to start in just a few hours time.

A night like this can take months of work to organise and set you back over $20,000 (£13,500) depending on your budget.

But the economic crunch here is curtailing the spending patterns of many Indian brides and grooms.

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International attention has focused on Pakistan like never before in the weeks following the Mumbai attacks. To quote Bruce Riedel, a former CIA officer and adviser to President-elect Barack Obama: “All of the world’s nightmares come together in Pakistan.”

Assuming the world does not have the option of turning its back on the country, what can it do to help Pakistan?

The short answer is that Pakistan needs economic assistance. The militant extremists who wreak havoc are, for the most part, unemployed and frustrated young men.

If the Pakistani people – as opposed to the Pakistani military – were given tangible, visible economic assistance, it would go a long way toward winning over a suspicious populace. After all, starving Pakistanis cannot eat the F-16s sold to their armed forces.

With that in mind, here are three suggestions.

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“I tend to think that cricket is the greatest thing that God created on earth,” Harold Pinter once said, “certainly greater than sex, although sex isn’t too bad either.” No harm, then, that the game should be the subject of his last interview, given in late October at his home in London. His health failing, Pinter was in nostalgic mood, recalling a childhood in Hackney, east London, during the blitz and his time as an evacuee. “I first watched cricket during the war. At one point we were all evacuated from our house when there was an air raid. We opened the door and our garden, with this large lilac tree, was alight all along the back wall. We were evacuated straight away. Though not before I took my cricket bat.

“I used to get up at five in the morning and play cricket. I had a great friend who is still going – he lives in Australia – called Mick, Mick Goldstein. He used to live around the corner from me in Hackney, and we were very close to the River Lea, and there were fields. We walked down to the fields; there’d be nobody about – it would really very early in the morning, and there would be a tree we used as a wicket. We would take it in turns to bat and bowl; we would be Lindwall, Miller, Hutton and Compton. That was the life.”

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The Taleban have ordered the closure of all girls’ schools in the war-ravaged Swat district and warned parents and teachers of dire consequences if the ban is flouted.

In an announcement made in mosques and broadcast on radio, the militant group set a deadline of January 15 for its order to be obeyed or it would blow up school buildings and attack schoolgirls. It also told women not to set foot outside their homes without being fully covered.

“Female education is against Islamic teachings and spreads vulgarity in society,” Shah Dauran, leader of a group that has established control over a large part of Swat district in the North West Frontier Province, declared this week.

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