the last show of the day

love the movie, love the ghazal and the in awe of the complexity...

Tue, 08 Dec 2009 18:20:00 -0500

love the movie, love the ghazal and the in awe of the complexity of their situation: two people breathlessly stuck in the simplicity of requited but unfilfilled love.

Life’s what you make it.

Tue, 24 Nov 2009 15:44:07 -0500

Life’s what you make it.

Literary Lines of the Day: “It did not do to think, nor,...

Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:47:23 -0500

Literary Lines of the Day:

“It did not do to think, nor, for the matter of that to feel. She gave up trying to understand herself, and the vast armies of the benighted, who follow neither the heart nor the brain, and march to their destiny by catch-words. The armies are full of pleasant and pious folk. But they have yielded to the only enemy that matters—the enemy within. They have sinned against passion and truth, and vain will be their strife after virtue. As the years pass, they are censured. Their pleasantry and their piety show cracks, their wit becomes cynicism, their unselfishness hypocrisy; they feel and produce discomfort wherever they go. They have sinned against Eros and against Pallas Athene, and not by any heavenly intervention, but by the ordinary course of nature, those allied deities will be avenged.

Lucy entered this army when she pretended to George that she did not love him, and pretended to Cecil that she loved no one. The night received her, as it had received Miss Bartlett thirty years before.”

A Room With A View
E.M.Forester
Chapter XVII: Lying to Cecil

Review: Love Aaj Kal Bahut Boring Ho Gaya.

Sun, 02 Aug 2009 22:15:00 -0400

I am a sucker for love stories. So Imitaz Ali’s new summer flick Love Aaj Kal didn’t have to be a revolutionary, insightful or different. As a genre-aficionado of the feel-good love story, give me a half-decent soundtrack, competent acting, and oodles of chemistry and I am already in love. As a romantic, I love the opportunity to indulge in cinematic escape from the persistent state of mid-life with my two kids in suburbia.

Unfortunately in Love Aaj Kal there is not much love between the sexy aaj and the sepia-toned kal.

Loves stories can explore so many possibilities: life-long friends who don’t realize they are soul-mates, two people hating each other only to discover surprisingly we don’t know love until we confront what we loathe, instant connections that defy practicality or a friendship that becomes bigger than its definition. There are so many angles and directions and nothing inspires more insight or entertainment than two people exploring common ground without a damn reason.

But once the couple confronts the overwhelming formality of Hindi movie love and the undeniable magnetism of physical attraction there is no going back to the before and certainly there is no hope of casual indifference.

Chemistry just can’t be hacked and the main loophole with Love Aaj Kal. There is no inexplicable chemistry between Love Aaj Kal’s hero and heroine despite looking fantastic and living so trendy.

This story starts between an already hipster couple Jai (Saif) and Meera (Deepika). Jai and Meera enjoy a youngling couple’s life in London: party, drink, make-out and dream about their prospective careers. Until Meera’s career as a restoration artist demands a move to India.

Early in the movie, Jai makes it clear, marriage has no future in his life but the moviegoer has no inkling how Meera feels about anything, marriage or her relationship with Jai. She is so ambivalent to their relationship that it left this moviegoer believing that Jai and Meera are really just having fun, the no strings attached kind (not that there is anything wrong with that either).

Jai wants to break up and Meera obliges like a good sport agreeing that marriage is for dorks and long distance relationship is bereft of any benefits. Ingeniously Meera and Jai host a break-off party with their large group of equally hip, trendy good-looking friends (none relevant to Jai, Meera, or the storyline).

A bye-bye party, a hug, and adios amigo, just like that Meera and Jai decide their relationship of two years has run its course and off they go into the world in different directions deciding to stay friends.

Thats the beginning of the movie: Jai and Meera break-up without the drama. Enters Veer (Rishi Kapoor) playing an adorable, extroverted spirited coffee bar owner who befriends Jai because he sees a younger avatar of himself in Jai and soon Veer and Jai share perspectives of love. Veer’s extracts of his heady days in love at first sight in the sixties of Old Delhi to a woman he sees but has never spoken nor touched. And Jai’s two-year ex-romance with a woman he has practically lived with and voila, they map their beliefs in a narrative that is the backdrop of Love Aaj Kal.

The direction is cute as Veer’s telling of story unfolds with Saif playing a younger Veer in the 1960s and then mapping it to what happened or is happening between Jai and Meera (who despite having broken up stay in touch and counsel each other in relationships with other people).

Will Jai realize what love means? Does Veer ever win his forbidden love in the lesser permissive times of history? All this unfolds as the plot of the movie goes between Veer’s story set in the 1960s and Jai’s in modern times.

Saif plays a competent hipster and a commitment phobic male reduced to a stereotype. We have met a Jai before, in real life and so often in cinema (he seems a cliche) and Saif plays the character true to the lines minus any complexity or dimension.

Deepika is just horribly rigid. Let’s just say Deepika can’t act because her dialogues, her presence, her dancing doesn’t fit the laid back Meera (my husband’s antics qualify him to be a thespian compared to Deepika’s coldness). Deepika suffers from model-made-only syndrome, she looks good but as soon as she opens her mouth the entire personality crashes. Deepika just can’t pull of an artist like Meera and as a result Meera’s personality never translates to the audience.

The script just doesn’t establish her character either. We just don’t know what Meera wants or the degree of her confusion. Does she want love or marriage or even Jai. Meera as a charcater is exists to give Jai a chance at realizing love on his own schedule.

Rishi Kapoor aaj aur kal is still the only lover boy if one is to judge by this movie. I mean even in a love story where his younger self in flashback is played by Saif he manages to steal the show. The Kapoor boy still has je ne sais quoi and his role is the only part of the story that evokes any trace of love in this story.

The script has it’s moments of fun and works to keep the narrative flowing.

The song sequences are forced even under Hindi movie norms they just irritate except possibly the track Chori Bazaar with its catchy composition and spontanteous apropos inclusion.

Overall the movie is okay. I was as ambivalent about the movie as the main characters are about being together. I frankly didn’t care if Jai and Meera made it to the altar or to Harrods for shopping.

If you have ever been in love, you know how incredibly free-falling and hard-hitting the experience. I have been in love, madly, crazily in that I will be 22-forever-kind-of-way and let me tell you love as a crush, unrequited, consummated, or otherwise has nothing to do with being practical.

My husband, always playing the devil’s advocate tried to make a case for modern love as depicted in this movie, his point being that modern love is practical laid-back since society has becomes more permissive, less judgmental. Hmmm, I don’t know if modern love is analogous to a stock transaction but if that’s the case, like Veer, I will constantly date myself when talking about love, old school.

Minus the soundtrack, high definition video, hipster hoods and homies, 12 years, two kids, there is still more chemistry and passion in my persistent state of mid-life than in Love Aaj Kal.

Bheeg Gaye Mera Mann by Kailesh Kher (it is a lovely metaphor if...

Wed, 22 Jul 2009 16:34:00 -0400

Bheeg Gaye Mera Mann by Kailesh Kher (it is a lovely metaphor if you can appreciate falling in love as similar to getting drenched in the monsoons of a tropical country).

Photo from Flickr user Sapan!

"When resentment and contention threatened to destroy his administration, he refused to be provoked..."

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 17:00:11 -0400

“When resentment and contention threatened to destroy his administration, he refused to be provoked by petty grievences, to submit to jealousy, or to brood over perceived slights. Through the apalling pressures he faced day after day, he retained an unflagging faith in his country’s cause.”

- Doris Goodwin, Team of Rivals, page xvii (about Lincoln)

megha jhar jhar

Mon, 22 Jun 2009 10:29:00 -0400

megha jhar jhar

Energy & Serenity

Sun, 21 Jun 2009 23:28:33 -0400

Energy & Serenity

Something Worth Fighting About

Sat, 20 Jun 2009 23:33:48 -0400

June 21, 2009 Op-Ed Columnist

New York Times: A Supreme Leader Loses His Aura as Iranians Flock to the Streets

By ROGER COHEN

TEHRAN — The Iranian police commander, in green uniform, walked up Komak Hospital Alley with arms raised and his small unit at his side. “I swear to God,” he shouted at the protesters facing him, “I have children, I have a wife, I don’t want to beat people. Please go home.”

A man at my side threw a rock at him. The commander, unflinching, continued to plead. There were chants of “Join us! Join us!” The unit retreated toward Revolution Street, where vast crowds eddied back and forth confronted by baton-wielding Basij militia and black-clad riot police officers on motorbikes.

Dark smoke billowed over this vast city in the late afternoon. Motorbikes were set on fire, sending bursts of bright flame skyward. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader, had used his Friday sermon to declare high noon in Tehran, warning of “bloodshed and chaos” if protests over a disputed election persisted.

He got both on Saturday — and saw the hitherto sacrosanct authority of his office challenged as never before since the 1979 revolution birthed the Islamic Republic and conceived for it a leadership post standing at the very flank of the Prophet. A multitude of Iranians took their fight through a holy breach on Saturday from which there appears to be scant turning back.

Khamenei has taken a radical risk. He has factionalized himself, so losing the arbiter’s lofty garb, by aligning himself with President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad against both Mir Hussein Moussavi, the opposition leader, and Ali Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, a founding father of the revolution.

He has taunted millions of Iranians by praising their unprecedented participation in an election many now view as a ballot-box putsch. He has ridiculed the notion that an official inquiry into the vote might yield a different result. He has tried pathos and he has tried pounding his lectern. In short, he has lost his aura.

The taboo-breaking response was unequivocal. It’s funny how people’s obsessions come back to bite them. I’ve been hearing about Khamenei’s fear of “velvet revolutions” for months now. There was nothing velvet about Saturday’s clashes. In fact, the initial quest to have Moussavi’s votes properly counted and Ahmadinejad unseated has shifted to a broader confrontation with the regime itself.

Garbage burned. Crowds bayed. Smoke from tear gas swirled. Hurled bricks sent phalanxes of police, some with automatic rifles, into retreat to the accompaniment of cheers. Early afternoon rumors that the rally for Moussavi had been canceled yielded to the reality of violent confrontation.

I don’t know where this uprising is leading. I do know some police units are wavering. That commander talking about his family was not alone. There were other policemen complaining about the unruly Basijis. Some security forces just stood and watched. “All together, all together, don’t be scared,” the crowd shouted.

I also know that Iran’s women stand in the vanguard. For days now, I’ve seen them urging less courageous men on. I’ve seen them get beaten and return to the fray. “Why are you sitting there?” one shouted at a couple of men perched on the sidewalk on Saturday. “Get up! Get up!”

Another green-eyed woman, Mahin, aged 52, staggered into an alley clutching her face and in tears. Then, against the urging of those around her, she limped back into the crowd moving west toward Freedom Square. Cries of “Death to the dictator!” and “We want liberty!” accompanied her.

There were people of all ages. I saw an old man on crutches, middle-aged office workers and bands of teenagers. Unlike the student revolts of 2003 and 1999, this movement is broad.

“Can’t the United Nations help us?” one woman asked me. I said I doubted that very much. “So,” she said, “we are on our own.”

The world is watching, and technology is connecting, and the West is sending what signals it can, but in the end that is true. Iranians have fought this lonely fight for a long time: to be free, to have a measure of democracy.

Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the leader of the Islamic revolution, understood that, weaving a little plurality into an authoritarian system. That pluralism has ebbed and flowed since 1979 — mainly the former — but last week it was crushed with blunt brutality. That is why a whole new generation of Iranians, their intelligence insulted, has risen.

I’d say the momentum is with them for now. At moments on Saturday, Khamenei’s authority, which is that of the Islamic Republic itself, seemed fragile. The revolutionary authorities have always mocked the cancer-ridden Shah’s ceding before an uprising, and vowed never to bend in the same way. Their firepower remains formidable, but they are facing a swelling test.

Just off Revolution Street, I walked into a pall of tear gas. I’d lit a cigarette minutes before — not a habit but a need — and a young man collapsed into me shouting, “Blow smoke in my face.” Smoke dispels the effects of the gas to some degree.

I did what I could and he said, “We are with you” in English and with my colleague we tumbled into a dead end — Tehran is full of them — running from the searing gas and police. I gasped and fell through a door into an apartment building where somebody had lit a small fire in a dish to relieve the stinging.

There were about 20 of us gathered there, eyes running, hearts racing. A 19-year-old student was nursing his left leg, struck by a militiaman with an electric-shock-delivering baton. “No way we are turning back,” said a friend of his as he massaged that wounded leg.

Later, we moved north, tentatively, watching the police lash out from time to time, reaching Victory Square where a pitched battle was in progress. Young men were breaking bricks and stones to a size for hurling. Crowds gathered on overpasses, filming and cheering the protesters. A car burst into flames. Back and forth the crowd surged, confronted by less-than-convincing police units.

I looked up through the smoke and saw a poster of the stern visage of Khomeini above the words, “Islam is the religion of freedom.”

Later, as night fell over the tumultuous capital, gunfire could be heard in the distance. And from rooftops across the city, the defiant sound of “Allah-u-Akbar” — “God is Great” — went up yet again, as it has every night since the fraudulent election. But on Saturday it seemed stronger. The same cry was heard in 1979, only for one form of absolutism to yield to another. Iran has waited long enough to be free.

Begin by Rumi

Wed, 17 Jun 2009 02:10:00 -0400

This is now. Now is,

all there is. Don’t wait for Then;
strike the spark, light the fire.

Sit at the Beloved’s table,
feast with gusto, drink your fill

then dance
the way branches
of jasmine and cypress
dance in a spring wind.

The green earth
is your cloth;
tailor your robe
with dignity and grace

"Fascism is not in itself a new order of society. It is the future refusing to be born."

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 21:25:36 -0400

“Fascism is not in itself a new order of society. It is the future refusing to be born.”

- Aneurin Bevan

Chemistry just can’t be hacked.

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 13:51:00 -0400

Chemistry just can’t be hacked.

Forgiveness

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 02:53:00 -0400

NYT: Out of Guantánamo, Uighurs Bask in Bermuda

Justin Maxon/The New York Times

AN OCEAN IDYLL Salahidin Abdulahat, left, and Khaleel Mamut, Uighur Muslims recently freed from Guantánamo Bay, swam in Bermuda on Sunday. Mr. Abdulahat said his first-ever ocean swim was “the happiest day of my life.” By ERIK ECKHOLM Published: June 14, 2009

ST. GEORGE, Bermuda — Almost exactly seven years after arriving at Guantánamo in chains as accused enemy combatants, and four days after their surprise predawn flight to Bermuda, four Uighur Muslim men basked in their new-found freedom here, grateful for the handshakes many residents had offered and marveling at the serene beauty of this tidy, postcard island.

ONCE DETAINEES, NOW TOURISTS The four freed Uighurs toured the historic district of St. George in Bermuda on Sunday. They have been greeted with hospitality by the island’s residents.

In newly purchased polo shirts and chinos, the four husky men, members of a restive ethnic minority from western China, might blend in except for their scruffy beards. Smelling hibiscus flowers, luxuriating in the freedom to drift through scenic streets and harbors, they expressed wonder at their good fortune in landing here after a captivity that included more than a year in solitary confinement.

“I went swimming in the ocean for the first time ever yesterday, and it was the happiest day of my life,” said Salahidin Abdulahat, 32.

Over a lunch of fish and chips on Sunday, they praised Bermuda for showing courage in the face of potential Chinese pressures that, in their view, powerful European countries had failed to muster.

The men were among a larger group of Uighurs (pronounced WEE-gers) who had fled what they called Chinese persecution of Muslims in western China and spent part of 2001 in a Uighur camp in Afghanistan. They fled, apparently unarmed, when the Americans bombed the camp, and were later turned in to the authorities by Pakistani villagers in return for an American bounty.

The four brought here, like 13 other Uighurs still at Guantánamo but expected to depart soon to other destinations, had been cleared by American officials and courts of taking up arms against the United States or ties to global terrorism.

But proposals to resettle them in the United States caused a political furor that the Obama administration did not want to aggravate. On Sunday, these four expressed a surprising lack of bitterness toward the United States, saying — as they had during interrogations years ago in Guantánamo — that they had never been anti-American and just wanted to get on with their lives.

“Before we were asking, ‘Why are the Americans doing this to us?’ ” said Mr. Abdulahat. Now, he said, with others nodding in agreement, “We have ended up in such a beautiful place. We don’t want to look back, and we don’t have any hard feelings toward the United States.”

While two of the men speak some English, all spoke in Uighur, aided by a Uighur woman who has translated at Guantánamo for them and for their lawyers.

Their resettlement on this British colony, known for yachting and pastel buildings, is a small step toward the administration’s aim of closing down Guantánamo by January. It has created a political tempest for the premier of Bermuda, who some say acted in an autocratic manner, and angered Britain’s Foreign Office, which is in charge of foreign policy and says it was not properly consulted.

But most objections voiced here concerned the secrecy of the deal rather than fears of having former terrorist suspects at large, as some have expressed in the United States. No quid pro quo has become public.

While some less affluent residents said they felt it was unfair to offer jobs and citizenship to men the United States itself would not take, many others shrugged and expressed pride at Bermudan hospitality. As the men venture from the seaside cottage where they temporarily live until they get jobs and figure out next steps, people often come up to shake their hands and wish them well, and the men said they were deeply touched.

Their homeland of Xinjiang, a largely Muslim region in western China where many residents chafe under Chinese rule, is landlocked, and many of the Uighur detainees saw an ocean — still a distant, mysterious presence — for the first time ever through fences at Guantánamo.

Now they can play in the waters. Khaleel Mamut, 31, said he went fishing on a boat on Saturday and caught his first fish ever. “I was so excited,” he said. “You just drop the hook in the water and you get a fish.” Hearing that fishing did not always bring such quick results, one of the other men quipped that perhaps the fish were joining in Bermuda’s welcome.

They have been promised work visas and, in perhaps a year or so, possible citizenship, their American lawyers said. That would give them passports and a right to travel.

“The intent is that they shall become Bermudians,” said Maj. Gen. Glenn W. Brangman, a retired officer appointed by the government to help the new arrivals and who greets them with hearty bear hugs.

Under the current arrangement, Bermuda will not allow the men to visit the United States. It is unclear whether they will ever be able to do so even if they gain Bermuda citizenship.

The four said they wanted nothing to do with their ostensible home country of China, which has demanded their repatriation and would almost certainly imprison them.

During interrogations at Guantánamo, these four and other Uighurs said they had ended up in Afghanistan after fleeing Chinese persecution and had wanted to work for the “liberation” of the Uighur people — a position regarded as treason in China.

Many said they had been shown how to fire a Kalashnikov rifle at the Uighur encampment, but had no real training, knew nothing of Al Qaeda, and did not fight the Americans or consider them the enemy.

These four were among a larger group that hid in mountain caves near Jalalabad after their camp was bombed by American forces in late 2001. Hungry, frightened and unarmed, they made their way to Pakistan, where villagers turned them in to the authorities in exchange for American reward money.

Years into their captivity, American officials concluded that the men should not be considered enemy combatants. Last October, a court ordered their release, but it was delayed by the inability to find a host country and a court reversal that prevented their move to American soil.

In 2007, five Uighurs were sent to Albania. Negotiations are under way to send all or most of the remaining 13 to the Pacific island of Palau.

Bermudans awoke Thursday to learn that the four had been flown in before dawn, with Premier Ewart F. Brown, who had negotiated in secret with the Americans, calling this “the right thing to do.” Opponents, who already regarded Mr. Brown as autocratic, called for a vote of no confidence, which could occur in weeks.

At the same time, the British governor here expressed his displeasure at being kept in the dark, and the British Foreign Office complained to Washington.

Mr. Brown’s fate may be uncertain, but when confronted with the four men in the flesh, many residents seem to warm to them.

Washington has walked a thin line in the handling of the Uighurs. It sought China’s support in antiterrorism efforts after the Sept. 11 attacks, branded an obscure Uighur independence group as terrorist and in 2002 allowed Chinese officials into Guantánamo to interrogate Uighur captives. The four men released here said that interrogation was a low point of their Guantánamo incarceration, with Chinese officials questioning them for long hours without food and threatening them and their families.

From the men’s own statements, it is clear that their presence in Afghanistan was linked to their animosity toward China. Whatever they might have wished in 2001, there is no evidence they sought to become part of a global jihad.

Now, over Chinese objections, the men are being released to third countries.

All that seems distant, the men said Sunday as they pondered, with some pleasure, the unexpected new turn in their lives.

Unending Love

Sat, 13 Jun 2009 22:18:57 -0400

I seem to have loved you in numberless forms, numberless times…
In life after life, in age after age, forever.
My spellbound heart has made and remade the necklace of songs,
That you take as a gift, wear round your neck in your many forms,
In life after life, in age after age, forever.

Whenever I hear old chronicles of love, it’s age old pain,
It’s ancient tale of being apart or together.
As I stare on and on into the past, in the end you emerge,
Clad in the light of a pole-star, piercing the darkness of time.
You become an image of what is remembered forever.

You and I have floated here on the stream that brings from the fount.
At the heart of time, love of one for another.
We have played along side millions of lovers,
Shared in the same shy sweetness of meeting,
the distressful tears of farewell,
Old love but in shapes that renew and renew forever.

By: Rabindranath Tagore

"Everything you do in life, every choice you make, has a consequence. When you do things without..."

Sat, 13 Jun 2009 17:54:53 -0400

“Everything you do in life, every choice you make, has a consequence. When you do things without thinkin’, then you ain’t makin’ the choice. The choice is makin’ you.”

- Mark Steven Johnson, Ghostrider, 2007

The song in my head

Thu, 11 Jun 2009 22:39:37 -0400

The song in my head