Directors Danny Boyle’s and Loveleen Tandan‘s “Slumdog Millionaire” swept the Oscars this year, in a remarkable sign of globalization. The creative team behind the film was largely British (Tandan began as a casting director and the screenplay was by Simon Beaufoy). But it was based on an Indian novel (Vikas Swarup’s Q & A), set in India with Indian actors, and deployed the cinematic techniques of Bollywood, the massive Indian film industry based in Bombay (a city that Indian television news anchors now call Mumbai but almost no one else does).
Globalization is implicit in the story from every direction. Author Swarup is an Indian diplomat as well as novelist, and has had postings in Turkey, the US, Britain and Ethiopia, and he is now Indian High Commissioner in Praetoria, South Africa. So the story springs from the mind of an inveterate expatriate who knows Ankara and Washington as well as Delhi.
And, the audience reception of the film was global, with Indian slum dwellers mounting angry protests, especially against the title. (“Dog,” or kutta is a highly derogatory thing to call someone in Hindi, maybe as pejorative as “pig” in the US. Most Indians don’t keep dogs as pets, and they are therefore often street animals and go feral. I tried to keep some dogs around as watchdogs in Lucknow by feeding them, but it was always a crap shoot whether they would attack me or the burglars). Just imagine if a film came out in the US about inner city minorities called “Ghetto Pigs.” Anti-globalization writer and acclaimed novelist Arundhati Roy slammed the film for neglecting to depict the real working class and its struggles, instead holding out the false hope of sudden riches.
If poverty-stricken urbanites were upset by the title, the concentration on Indian poverty disturbed middle and upper class Indians who have seen their country advance from fourth-world poverty to the elements of an advanced economy. (Within India’s more than one billion population, there is a middle-class country of 80 million, the size of Germany–with satellite televisions, nice cars, well-appointed homes, and white collar jobs hooked into the world economy). I can’t tell you how tired middle class South Asians get of the Western depiction of their region as destitute, or the use of it to make Western children clean their plates.
That the film was feted in Hollywood even as it was reviled in parts of India was anyway a huge change. As recently as 1992, legendary Bengali director Satyajit Ray received a lifetime achievement Oscar as a nod to the cognoscenti. Ray and other Indian auteurs were in some sense in another universe, off-stage, and so could be symbolically honored at the Oscars. “Slumdog” was the life of this year’s party. India has arrived in American arts.
Boyle, the director of “Trainspotting,” brings his dark vision to this depiction of Indian slum life. Both films contain disgusting immersions in toilets in fulfillment of an obsession, whether with a cocaine high or the autograph of Indian acting giant Amitabh Bachchan. Both contain scenes of gratuitous violence, whether the smashing of a patron’s face by a beer bottle carelessly and indiscriminately thrown from an upper story in a pub, or the cocky gunplay of a budding Bombay gangster. (It is one of the flaws in the argument of figures such as actor Amitabh Bachchan that the film is unfair to India, that Boyle did not exactly portray a Western place like Scotland in a complimentary way, either; he is interested in the downtrodden and hopeless, wherever they are.)
“Slumdog Millionaire” also draws heavily on Bollywood tropes. While most such films are 3-hour melodramas about star-crossed lovers who have to outwit their hidebound parents to get married, “Slumdog” substitutes a gangster brother and his gangster fictive family for the meddling groom’s parents as a plot device for keeping the lovers apart. While greed or perhaps a drive to escape existential boredom drove “Trainspotting,” Jamal Malik’s (Dev Patel’s) unceasing search for his beloved Latika (Freida Pinto) drives “Slumdog.”
But Bollywood themes are also sidestepped. Whereas in most Indian films, a love affair between a Muslim boy like Jamal and a Hindu girl like Latika would be impeded by caste conventions that make such unions socially difficult, in this film that they are orphans and slum dwellers deracinates them to the point where caste and religion are irrelevant. The only one who practices religion in this film is Jamal’s gangster older brother Salim, and even this dallying with mainstream belief and practice has the distinct disadvantage for him of endowing him with a belated conscience. The other context in which religion appears is the Shiv Sena Hindu mob that attacks Jamal’s family and neighborhood, imprinting on his mind the appearance of the God Ram (which otherwise a poor Muslim boy might know little about).
The film is plot-driven, not character-driven. In fact, it is puzzle-driven, since each episode in Jamal’s life, in almost picaresque fashion, is told around the answer to a question on the Indian version of “Who wants to be a Millionaire?” (The other side of globalization is that such television phenomena typically have iterations in each major country around the world; Indian Idol is now very popular).
Jamal’s character, with his quiet stubborn integrity, never alters from childhood to adulthood. Salim is a fighter throughout. And Latika is never defined, swinging between easy coquetry, realistic debauchery, resigned domestic slavery and the high-mindedness of having a one true love. It is the failure of character development and the concentration on puzzle-solving that are the least satisfying and least realistic elements of the film. Would Jamal really never have learned to compromise, ethically or otherwise, in the conditions under which he grew up? Would not Latika have been warped and neurotic and disease-ridden after those years of sexual bondage?
The glamorization of the poor in the film was among the elements that provoked howls of outrage in India itself, drawing charges of “poverty porn” and the promotion of ghetto tourism on the part of the Western affluent.
That the film depicts an one-dimensional view of the poorer areas of Bombay is undeniable. There are Fagins and pimps, gangsters and corrupt building contractors, courtesans and orphans. But poor neighborhoods in India are a dense thicket of social and economic networks, with a working class, shopkeepers, peddlers, and other responsible if poor citizens toiling to eke out an honest living. The film eschews the urban working class for an unrealistic focus solely on the criminal element. Extortion rackets exist. But they prey on small restaurants and shops. If there were no honest workers or businesses, there would be no way to extract protection money.
Both the celebrations and the protests, the bouquets and the brickbats attest the increasing connectedness of the human world, in what Teilhard de Chardin called the “noosphere.” Only in a cyberspace-enabled noosphere could worker activists in the poor areas of Bombay mount real-time protests even as a plethora of golden Oscars were handed out in the poshest venue on the planet. And if the workers in Bombay can as a result of the success of the film draw the attention of the world to the costs of unregulated “flat” globalization, if they can counter Friedmanism from the heart of the displacements caused by Neoliberalism, then the saga of Jamal Malik will have had an impact far beyond the realm of cinema. They aren’t dogs. They are productive human beings. And their struggle is not over.
Some parts of the world, you know better than others even if you are a world traveler. The Khan al-Khalili Bazaar in Cairo is one of those special places for me. I once interviewed its older goldsmiths and silversmiths about their recollections of when the jewellers’ guilds disappeared. They thought, the 1940s. I ransacked the used book marts for the Khedivial Printing Press 19th century editions at Bulaq of works such as the chronicle of Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti, which I later used when I wrote my book, Napoleon’s Egypt. I had my finds bound in the traditional style by its bookbinders.
I sipped mint tea outside the shops where you buy mother-of-pearl inlaid boxes and carved wooden camels. I toured the nearby Mamluk mansion where they filmed scenes for one of the James Bond films. I visited the mosque-shrine of Husayn, the grandson of the prophet, killed at Karbala in Iraq, whose severed head was said to have been interred there by the Shiite Fatimid dynasty. Khan al-Khalili is an emporium to the world. Last year 12 million tourists visited Egypt, mostly Europeans (including a big contingent of Eastern Europeans). Almost all went through Khan al-Khalili.
I can remember talking to one of the store owners, the father of a family friend, about what the worst downturns in business were that he had experienced over the years. He frowned. That’s easy. 1956, 1967, 1973, 1982. The Arab-Israeli Wars. It is not, he said, that fewer tourists and customers came in those years. They did not come at all. They were years when the weaker and more extended merchants went under.
The radical Muslim extremists figured this vulnerability out. They thought if they could destroy the tourist trade, they could pull the plug on the government of Hosni Mubarak, depriving it of revenue from that trade. In the 1980s and 1990s they directly attacked tourists.
But it turns out that like most of the brain-dead tactics of the terrorists, this one always backfires on them. So many Egyptians depend on the revenues from the tourist trade that they view attacks on tourists as a death knell for their own jobs and economy. And Egyptian culture has a basic sense of decency and humaneness that they cannot square with killing innocent foreigners. The radicals made themselves political pariahs. The biggest radical group, The Islamic Grouping or Gama’a Islamiyah, once headed by the blind Sheikh, Omar Abdel Rahman (who spearheaded the first World Trade Center bombing, in 1993), was rounded up in the thousands. They became so hated and had so few options that they announced they were giving up on violence (not that they were pacifists, but they decided that as a tactic it was not permitted in most circumstances).
The neo-Gama’a was roundly denounced by Ayman al-Zawahiri, the leader of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad and the number 2 man in al-Qaeda. But his organization had become little more than a tiny political cult inside Egypt.
If I had to guess, I’d guess a small surviving cell of EIJ dropped the two bombs from the balcony of the Hussein Hotel into the marketplace.
I’d also guess that the bombing came in response to the Egyptian government’s tacit support for the Israeli campaign against Hamas in Gaza in December and January. The radicals had been repressed, penetrated, tapped, imprisoned, watched. They had made deals. There hadn’t been a bombing in Cairo for some time. But my guess is that for a few of them, Gaza was a deal breaker.
A recent opinion piece by Mahmud Al-Mubarak in the pan-Arab London daily, al-Hayat [Life] on the “Neo-Terrorists” (translated by the USG Open Source Center) explained:
‘ From this viewpoint, the justifications for continued closure of the Rafah crossing no longer gets popular acceptance inside or outside Egypt. Perhaps this answers the question on the reason for targeting the Egyptian leadership. Gaza and the Arab peoples with it did not ask Egypt for military help, even though this does not conflict with the entitlement in international law to “self-defense” since the Palestinian lands are “under occupation”, with Article 51 of the UN Charter giving peoples the right to defend themselves when subjected to armed aggression. Thus suspicions are raised when the delivery of even humanitarian assistance is prevented!
This is because the logical thing is that in the event of a natural or humanitarian disaster, the people of any affected country migrate to their nearest neighbor . . .
The situation is different in Gaza. The people of Gaza do not want to migrate to Egypt but want to remain in their lands, despite the continuation of the Israeli aggression by air, land, and sea! But they are in dire need of humanitarian assistance. Forbidding the delivery of this assistance to Gaza is considered “a crime against humanity”, in addition to contravening humanitarian principles and ethics. We should remember that after the Katrina hurricane struck the eastern United States in the fall of 2005, all world countries rushed to help. This included Arab countries that did so as a courtesy in line with international ethics, even though it was a natural disaster not a man-made disaster and the United States did not need material assistance.
The millions in the Arab countries who are following the Israeli massacres against children, women, and the elderly, directly on the air are poised to create a new generation of “terrorists” who want to “exterminate the Jews by all means”, as the Israeli youth put it, for with the launching of every Israeli missile, each piece of shrapnel, and each bullet fired on Gaza anew “terrorist” is born in the Arab world.’
You see, the world has already forgotten Gaza and the horrors perpetrated there, the little girls killed at home while their father was gone, the children hugging their dead mothers for days as aid workers were kept out. But some took it personally. Some thought it so horrendous, so existentially unacceptable, that they had to act. Terrorists are monsters because they most often imagine themselves to be high-minded. They are people who never learned in kindergarten that two wrongs do not make a right, and never learned in life that, as Gandhi said, an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.
Whether the Khan al-Khalili bombing was mainly a reaction to the Gaza War it is too soon to tell. That there will be violent such reactions, some of which will probably kill Americans, seems to me highly likely.
The skits denied Jesus’s miracles, said he died young because he was too fat and so could not have walked on water, and said Mother Mary was not a virgin but rather a promiscuous woman who had had many lovers and first got pregnant in high school at age 15. Palestinian-Israelis viewed them as a secular Israeli attack on Arab beliefs and folkways. That is, the pieces were viewed as racist and not just anti-religious but as ethnic bigotry. They were even called “anti-Semitic,” since Arabs are Semites as are Jews.
Muslims believe that Jesus was an envoy of God and revere him and Mary. The Quran devotes more space to Mary and the nativity than does the New Testament. So the show offended Israeli Muslims, as well. I saw them on Aljazeera speaking out against the skits and denouncing them as racist (`unsuri).
The way in which the incident was interpreted in the terms of Israeli identity politics suggests that nerves are frayed among Palestinian-Israelis in the wake of the massive Israeli assault on Gaza this winter. Already humiliated by Israeli disregard for the value of innocent Arab life in that campaign, they are sensitive to any slights from the Jewish Israeli majority.
So what did we learn here? A Jewish-Israeli attack on the holy figures of Christianity provoked outrage among Muslims as well as Christians, and was denounced by Palestinian-Israelis (20% of the population) as racist and as anti-Semitic.
One background for this Palestinian-Israeli response is that the crucified Christ is often taken by Palestinian Christians as a symbol of their displacement and expropriation at the hands of Israelis. So the attack on that symbol (‘died young of being obese’) by a representative of the Jewish majority was doubly painful, since it repeated on a symbolic level the Israeli denial of the 1948 Catastrophe and even of the existence of the Palestinians.
‘ Iran has not converted the low-grade uranium that it has produced into weapon-grade uranium, inspectors belonging to the International Atomic Energy Agency have said.
The Austrian Press Agency quoted an IAEA expert as saying that the uranium substances that Iran has produced at its Natanz enrichment facility have been carefully recorded and remote cameras have been installed to supervise part of the stockpile.
“If the Iranians intend to transport these uranium substances to a secret location for further processing, agency’s inspectors will find out,” he said.
The expert added that “so far, Iran has carried out good cooperation with us in relevant verifications”.
IAEA head Mohamed ElBaradei has said that Iran has slowed down its uranium enrichment programme.’
US newspapers are complaining that they are losing money and may not survive. After they put all sorts of falsehoods about Iraq on their front pages, it may be that they fatally wounded their credibility with the US public. In any case, the above report does not show up anywhere on the web or in Lexis that I can find, except here in The Hindu, which tells me that someone is not doing their job.
Iran cannot construct nuclear bombs with uranium enriched only to less than 4%. It needs to be enriched to something like 90% to make a bomb. Iran is not known even to have that capability, and no it cannot be done in 2 months (try a decade), assuming they were trying to do it, which our $40 bn. a year intelligence agencies say they are not. So all the silly articles on Friday about how iran now has enough enriched uranium to make a bomb are just illiterate. Moreover, the report in question actually says that Iran is slowing its enrichment activities.
Now that the Likud is back in control of Israel, flanked by even less savory far-right forces, we will unfortunately be bombarded by inflammatory propaganda about how dangerous Iran is. Iran hasn’t aggressively invaded another country in at least a century and a half. In contrast, the Likud never met a war of aggression they did not like.
Netanyahu has vowed to abandon negotiations with the Palestinians, and says he will expand the program of Israeli colonization of the Palestinian West Bank.
Despite today’s faintly ridiculous attempt in the NYT to depict Netanyahu as a born-again pragmantist, in fact he rejects any withdrawal from the Palestinian West Bank by Israeli squatters, despite Israel’s commitment to pull back in the Oslo accords. Since the West Bank looks like Swiss cheese with regard to administration and settlement patterns, there isn’t a Palestinian state to be had there without an extensive Israeli pullback, and Netanyahu has never shown any interest in either pullback or Palestinian state.
Now his people are trying to revive this bizarre idea of giving Jordan some sort of vague authority over the West Bank Palestinians as a way of denying them statehood in their own right. Jordan’s government has been under severe pressure to expel the Israeli ambassador over the brutal Gaza campaign, and any such active collaboration with Israel to repress the West Bankers would risk toppling the Hashemite throne. King Hussein once accused Netanyahu of single-handedly destroying every positive thing the Jordanian monarch had worked for.
Netanyahu is a train wreck for the Middle East. He is willing to ally with Avigdor Lieberman, an open racist who is gunning for the 20 percent of Israel’s citizen population that is Palestinian. Netanyahu wants a war with Iran, and when the Israeli Right wants a war nowadays, they usually want our children to fight and die in it for them. The 1996 “Clean Break” Neoconservative policy paper advocating a war on Iraq was written for Netanyahu. (They are not satisfied with picking our pockets for their weapons and colonization projects). Netanyahu will further oppress and brutalize the Palestinians, which he will keep in a slave-like condition of statelessness, and from whom he will steal what little property they have left. Last time he was in office he went around poisoning his enemies, for all the world like the Bulgarian KGB in the old days.
Netanyahu is the devil’s gift to international terrorism, which his policies will provoke. Fifty years from now, the turn of Israel to the hard right will be looked back upon as the beginning of the end of Israel, the time when the crucial decisions were made that rendered it impossible for the Israelis to stay in the Middle East in the face of the increasing popular anger Netanyahu will have provoked in 1.5 billion Muslims. No, Israel cannot be defeated on the battleground. But the French colons in Algeria were never really defeated on the battleground, either, nor were the thousands of Britons who had ruled India.
More immediately, all Americans will have reason to rue Netanyahu’s return to power, since the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and other elements of the powerful Israel lobbies will pull Congress around to support Likudnik policies in the next few years.
Angry Shiite crowds went on a rampage against Sunnis in the city. The Pakistani authorities stepped in to impose a curfew.
The violent Taliban Movement of Pakistan of South Waziristan is a likely candidate for perpetrator. The Federally Administered Tribal Areas are sandwiched between the western Punjab (or the North-Western Frontier Province to the north) and the Afghan border. The people of D.I. Khan largely speak Siraiki, a dialect of Punjabi, and engage in the traditional religious practices of rural Punjabi Muslims. Some are Twelver Shiites, others Sunnis of various sorts, including Sufis who attend at saints’ shrines (strictly forbidden in the radical reformist doctrine of the Taliban). There is an element of ethnic conflict in such violence, since the Taliban are largely Pushtuns (in Pakistan called Pathans).
Shiites recently commemorated that 40th day after the martyrdom of Imam Husayn, the grandson of the Prophet Muhammad. Shiite mourning practices in South Asia include flagellation, attendance as shrines, and the staging of street processions in which bamboo and tinsel representations of the tomb of Husayn in Karbala, Iraq, are carried through the streets. These practices, and Shiism itself, are viewed as idolatrous by Sunni fundamentalists of the Salafi, Wahhabi and Taliban stripes. The following video, from Ashura 2008, depicts Shiites commemorating the time-period when Husayn was martyred, in D. I. Khan:
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