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Claude Lévi-Strauss Dies at 100 - Obituary (Obit) - NYTimes.com

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Claude Lévi-Strauss Dies at 100 - Obituary (Obit) - NYTimes.com: "Claude Lévi-Strauss Dies at 100

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By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
Published: November 3, 2009

Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French anthropologist who transformed Western understanding of what was once called “primitive man” and who towered over the French intellectual scene in the 1960s and ’70s, has died at 100.

Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French anthropologist and father of structuralism, has died at the age of 100.

His death was announced Tuesday, the same day he was buried in the village of Lignerolles, in the Côte-d’Or region southeast of Paris, where he had a country home.

“He had expressed the wish to have a discreet and sober funeral, with his family, in his country house,” his son said. “He was attached to this place; he liked to take walks in the forest, and the cemetery where he is now buried is just on the edge of this forest.”

A powerful thinker, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was an avatar of “structuralism,” a school of thought in which universal “structures” were believed to underlie all human activity, giving shape to seemingly disparate cultures and creations. His work was a profound influence even on his critics, of whom there were many. There has been no comparable successor to him in France. And his writing — a mixture of the pedantic and the poetic, full of daring juxtapositions, intricate argument and elaborate metaphors — resembles little that had come before in anthropology.

A descendant of a distinguished French-Jewish artistic family, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was a quintessential French intellectual, as comfortable in the public sphere as in the academy. He taught at universities in Paris, New York and São Paulo and also worked for the United Nations and the French government.

His legacy is imposing. “Mythologiques,” his four-volume work about the structure of native mythology in the Americas, attempts nothing less than an interpretation of the world of culture and custom, shaped by analysis of several hundred myths of little-known tribes and traditions. The volumes — “The Raw and the Cooked,” “From Honey to Ashes,” “The Origin of Table Manners” and “The Naked Man,” published from 1964 to 1971 — challenge the reader with their complex interweaving of theme and detail.

In his analysis of myth and culture, Mr. Lévi-Strauss might contrast imagery of monkeys and jaguars; consider the differences in meaning of roasted and boiled food (cannibals, he suggested, tended to boil their friends and roast their enemies); and establish connections between weird mythological tales and ornate laws of marriage and kinship.

Many of his books include diagrams that look like maps of interstellar geometry, formulas that evoke mathematical techniques, and black-and-white photographs of scarified faces and exotic ritual that he made during his field work.

His interpretations of North and South American myths were pivotal in changing Western thinking about so-called primitive societies. He began challenging the conventional wisdom about them shortly after beginning his anthropological research in the 1930s — an experience that became the basis of an acclaimed 1955 book, “Tristes Tropiques,” a sort of anthropological meditation based on his travels in Brazil and elsewhere.

The accepted view held that primitive societies were intellectually unimaginative and temperamentally irrational, basing their approaches to life and religion on the satisfaction of urgent needs for food, clothing and shelter.

Mr. Lévi-Strauss rescued his subjects from this limited perspective. Beginning with the Caduveo and Bororo tribes in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil, where he did his first and primary fieldwork, he found among them a dogged quest not just to satisfy material needs but also to understand origins, a sophisticated logic that governed even the most bizarre myths, and an implicit sense of order and design, even among tribes who practiced ruthless warfare.

His work elevated the status of “the savage mind, ” a phrase that became the English title of one of his most forceful surveys, “La Pensée Sauvage” (1962).

“The thirst for objective knowledge,” he wrote, “is one of the most neglected aspects of the thought of people we call ‘primitive.’ ”

The world of primitive tribes was fast disappearing, he wrote. From 1900 to 1950, more than 90 tribes and 15 languages had disappeared in Brazil alone. This was another of his recurring themes. He worried about the growth of a “mass civilization,” of a modern “monoculture.” He sometimes expressed exasperated self-disgust with the West and its “own filth, thrown in the face of mankind.”

In this seeming elevation of the savage mind and denigration of Western modernity, he was writing within the tradition of French Romanticism, inspired by the 18th-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whom Mr. Lévi-Strauss revered. It was a view that helped build Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s public reputation in the era of countercultural romanticism in the 1960s and ’70s.

But such simplified romanticism was also a distortion of his ideas. For Mr. Lévi-Strauss, the savage was not intrinsically noble or in any way “closer to nature.” Mr. Lévi-Strauss was withering, for example, when describing the Caduveo, whom he portrayed as a tribe so in rebellion against nature — and thus doomed — that it even shunned procreation, choosing to “reproduce” by abducting children from enemy tribes.

His descriptions of American Indian tribes bear little relation to the sentimental and pastoral clichés that have become commonplace. Mr. Lévi-Strauss also made sharp distinctions between the primitive and the modern, focusing on the development of writing and historical awareness. It was an awareness of history, in his view, that allowed the development of science and the evolution and expansion of the West. But he worried about the fate of the West. It was, he wrote in The New York Review of Books, “allowing itself to forget or destroy its own heritage.”

With the fading of myth’s power in the modern West, he also suggested that music had taken on myth’s function. Music, he argued, had the ability to suggest, with primal narrative power, the conflicting forces and ideas that lie at the foundation of society.

But Mr. Lévi-Strauss rejected Rousseau’s idea that humankind’s problems derive from society’s distortions of nature. In Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s view, there is no alternative to such distortions. Each society must shape itself out of nature’s raw material, he believed, with law and reason as the essential tools.

This application of reason, he argued, created universals that could be found across all cultures and times. He became known as a structuralist because of his conviction that a structural unity underlies all of humanity’s mythmaking, and he showed how those universal motifs played out in societies, even in the ways a village was laid out.

For Mr. Lévi-Strauss, for example, every culture’s mythology was built around oppositions: hot and cold, raw and cooked, animal and human. And it is through these opposing “binary” concepts, he said, that humanity makes sense of the world.

This was quite different from what most anthropologists had been concerned with. Anthropology had traditionally sought to disclose differences among cultures rather than discovering universals. It had been preoccupied not with abstract ideas but with the particularities of rituals and customs, collecting and cataloguing them.

Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s “structural” approach, seeking universals about the human mind, cut against that notion of anthropology. He did not try to determine the various purposes served by a society’s practices and rituals. He was never interested in the kind of fieldwork that anthropologists of a later generation, like Clifford Geertz, took on, closely observing and analyzing a society as if from the inside. (He began “Tristes Tropiques” with the statement “I hate traveling and explorers.”)

To his mind, as he wrote in “The Raw and the Cooked,” translated from “Le Cru et le Cuit” (1964), he had taken “ethnographic research in the direction of psychology, logic, and philosophy.”

In radio talks for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1977 (published as “Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture”), Mr. Lévi-Strauss demonstrated how a structural examination of myth might proceed. He cited a report that in 17th-century Peru, when the weather became exceedingly cold, a priest would summon all those who had been born feet first, or who had a harelip, or who were twins. They were accused of being responsible for the weather and were ordered to repent, to correct the aberrations. But why these groups? Why harelips and twins?

Mr. Lévi-Strauss cited a series of North American myths that associate twins with opposing natural forces: threat and promise, danger and expectation. One myth, for example, includes a magical hare, a rabbit, whose nose is split in a fight, resulting, literally, in a harelip, suggesting an incipient twinness. With his injunctions, the Peruvian priest seemed aware of associations between cosmic disorder and the latent powers of twins.

Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s ideas shook his field. But his critics were plentiful. They attacked him for ignoring history and geography, using myths from one place and time to help illuminate myths from another, without demonstrating any direct connection or influence.

In an influential critical survey of his work in 1970, the Cambridge University anthropologist Edmund Leach wrote of Mr. Lévi-Strauss: “Even now, despite his immense prestige, the critics among his professional colleagues greatly outnumber the disciples.”

Mr. Leach himself doubted whether Mr. Lévi-Strauss, during his fieldwork in Brazil, could have conversed with “any of his native informants in their native language” or stayed long enough to confirm his first impressions. Some of Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s theoretical arguments, including his explanation of cannibals and their tastes, have been challenged by empirical research.

Mr. Lévi-Strauss conceded that his strength was in his interpretations of what he discovered and thought that his critics did not sufficiently credit the cumulative impact of those speculations. “Why not admit it?” he once said to an interviewer, Didier Eribon, in “Conversations with Lévi-Strauss” (1988). “I was fairly quick to discover that I was more a man for the study than for the field.”

Claude Lévi-Strauss was born on Nov. 28, 1908, in Belgium to Raymond Lévi-Strauss and the former Emma Levy. He grew up in France, near Versailles, where his grandfather was a rabbi and his father a portrait painter. His great-grandfather Isaac Strauss was a Strasbourg violinist mentioned by Berlioz in his memoirs. As a child, he loved to collect disparate objects and juxtapose them. “I had a passion for exotic curios,” he says in “Conversations.” “My small savings all went to the secondhand shops.” A large collection of Jewish antiquities from his family’s collection, he said, was displayed in the Musée de Cluny; others were looted after France fell to the Nazis in 1940.

From 1927 to 1932, Claude obtained degrees in law and philosophy at the University of Paris, then taught in a local high school, the Lycée Janson de Sailly, where his fellow teachers included Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. He later became a professor of sociology at the French-influenced University of São Paulo in Brazil.

Determined to become an anthropologist, he began making trips into the country’s interior, accompanied by his wife, Dina Dreyfus, whom he married in 1932. “I was envisaging a way of reconciling my professional education with my taste for adventure,” he said in “Conversations,” adding: “I felt I was reliving the adventures of the first 16th-century explorers.”

His marriage to Ms. Dreyfus ended in divorce, as did a subsequent marriage, in 1946, to Rose-Marie Ullmo, with whom he had a son, Laurent. In 1954 he married Monique Roman, and they, too, had a son, Matthieu. Besides Laurent, Mr. Lévi-Strauss is survived by his wife and Matthieu as well as Matthieu’s two sons.

Mr. Lévi-Strauss left teaching in 1937 and devoted himself to fieldwork, returning to France in 1939 for further study. But on the eve of war, he was drafted into the French Army to serve as a liaison with British troops. In “Tristes Tropiques,” he writes of his “disorderly retreat” from the Maginot Line after Hitler’s invasion of France, fleeing in cattle trucks, sleeping in “sheep folds.”

In 1941, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was invited to become a visiting professor at the New School for Social Research in New York, with help from the Rockefeller Foundation. He called it “the most fruitful period of my life,” spending time in the reading room of the New York Public Library and befriending the distinguished American anthropologist Franz Boas.

He also became part of a circle of artists and Surrealists, including Max Ernst, André Breton and Sartre’s future mistress, Dolorès Vanetti. Ms. Vanetti, who shared his “passion for objects,” Mr. Lévi-Strauss said in “Conversations,” regularly visited an antique shop on Third Avenue in Manhattan that sold artifacts from the Pacific Northwest, leaving Mr. Lévi-Strauss with the “impression that all the essentials of humanity’s artistic treasures could be found in New York.'

After the war, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was so intent on pursuing his studies in New York that he was given the position of cultural attaché by the French government until 1947. On his return to France, he earned a doctorate in letters from the University of Paris in 1948 and was associate curator at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris in 1948 and 1949. His first major book, “The Elementary Structures of Kinship,” was published in 1949. (Several years later, the jury of the Prix Goncourt, France’s most famous literary award, said that it would have given the prize to “Tristes Tropiques,” his hybrid of memoir and anthropological travelogue, had it been fiction.)

After the Rockefeller Foundation gave the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris a grant to create a department of social and economic sciences, Mr. Lévi-Strauss became the director of studies at the school, remaining in the post from 1950 to 1974.

Other positions followed. From 1953 to 1960, he served as secretary general of the International Social Science Council at Unesco. In 1959, he was appointed professor at the Collège de France. He was elected to the French Academy in 1973. By 1960, Mr. Lévi-Strauss had founded L’Homme, a journal modeled on The American Anthropologist.

By the 1980s, structuralism as imagined by Mr. Lévi-Strauss had been displaced by French thinkers who became known as poststructuralists: writers like Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. They rejected the idea of timeless universals and argued that history and experience were far more important in shaping human consciousness than universal laws.

“French society, and especially Parisian, is gluttonous,” Mr. Lévi-Strauss responded. “Every five years or so, it needs to stuff something new in its mouth. And so five years ago it was structuralism, and now it is something else. I practically don’t dare use the word ‘structuralist’ anymore, since it has been so badly deformed. I am certainly not the father of structuralism.”

But Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s version of structuralism may end up surviving post-structuralism, just as he survived most of its avatars. His monumental four-volume work, “Mythologiques,” may ensure his legacy, as a creator of mythologies if not their explicator.

The final volume ends by suggesting that the logic of mythology is so powerful that myths almost have a life independent from the peoples who tell them. In his view, they speak through the medium of humanity and become, in turn, the tools with which humanity comes to terms with the world’s greatest mystery: the possibility of not being, the burden of mortality."

Claude Lévi-Strauss Dies at 100 - Obituary (Obit) - NYTimes.com

2009-11-04T09:04:00.000+05:30

Claude Lévi-Strauss Dies at 100 - Obituary (Obit) - NYTimes.com: "Claude Lévi-Strauss Dies at 100

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By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN
Published: November 3, 2009

Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French anthropologist who transformed Western understanding of what was once called “primitive man” and who towered over the French intellectual scene in the 1960s and ’70s, has died at 100.
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Claude Lévi-Strauss, the French anthropologist and father of structuralism, has died at the age of 100.
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His son Laurent said Mr. Lévi-Strauss died of cardiac arrest Friday at his home in Paris. His death was announced Tuesday, the same day he was buried in the village of Lignerolles, in the Côte-d’Or region southeast of Paris, where he had a country home.

“He had expressed the wish to have a discreet and sober funeral, with his family, in his country house,” his son said. “He was attached to this place; he liked to take walks in the forest, and the cemetery where he is now buried is just on the edge of this forest.”

A powerful thinker, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was an avatar of “structuralism,” a school of thought in which universal “structures” were believed to underlie all human activity, giving shape to seemingly disparate cultures and creations. His work was a profound influence even on his critics, of whom there were many. There has been no comparable successor to him in France. And his writing — a mixture of the pedantic and the poetic, full of daring juxtapositions, intricate argument and elaborate metaphors — resembles little that had come before in anthropology.

“People realize he is one of the great intellectual heroes of the 20th century,” Philippe Descola, the chairman of the anthropology department at the Collège de France, said last November in an interview with The New York Times on the centenary of Mr. Levi-Strauss’s birth. Mr. Lévi-Strauss was so revered that at least 25 countries celebrated his 100th birthday.

A descendant of a distinguished French-Jewish artistic family, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was a quintessential French intellectual, as comfortable in the public sphere as in the academy. He taught at universities in Paris, New York and São Paulo and also worked for the United Nations and the French government.

His legacy is imposing. “Mythologiques,” his four-volume work about the structure of native mythology in the Americas, attempts nothing less than an interpretation of the world of culture and custom, shaped by analysis of several hundred myths of little-known tribes and traditions. The volumes — “The Raw and the Cooked,” “From Honey to Ashes,” “The Origin of Table Manners” and “The Naked Man,” published from 1964 to 1971 — challenge the reader with their complex interweaving of theme and detail.

In his analysis of myth and culture, Mr. Lévi-Strauss might contrast imagery of monkeys and jaguars; consider the differences in meaning of roasted and boiled food (cannibals, he suggested, tended to boil their friends and roast their enemies); and establish connections between weird mythological tales and ornate laws of marriage and kinship.

Many of his books include diagrams that look like maps of interstellar geometry, formulas that evoke mathematical techniques, and black-and-white photographs of scarified faces and exotic ritual that he made during his field work.

His interpretations of North and South American myths were pivotal in changing Western thinking about so-called primitive societies. He began challenging the conventional wisdom about them shortly after beginning his anthropological research in the 1930s — an experience that became the basis of an acclaimed 1955 book, “Tristes Tropiques,” a sort of anthropological meditation based on his travels in Brazil and elsewhere.

The accepted view held that primitive societies were intellectually unimaginative and temperamentally irrational, basing their approaches to life and religion on the satisfaction of urgent needs for food, clothing and shelter.

Mr. Lévi-Strauss rescued his subjects from this limited perspective. Beginning with the Caduveo and Bororo tribes in the Mato Grosso region of Brazil, where he did his first and primary fieldwork, he found among them a dogged quest not just to satisfy material needs but also to understand origins, a sophisticated logic that governed even the most bizarre myths, and an implicit sense of order and design, even among tribes who practiced ruthless warfare.

His work elevated the status of “the savage mind, ” a phrase that became the English title of one of his most forceful surveys, “La Pensée Sauvage” (1962).

“The thirst for objective knowledge,” he wrote, “is one of the most neglected aspects of the thought of people we call ‘primitive.’ ”

The world of primitive tribes was fast disappearing, he wrote. From 1900 to 1950, more than 90 tribes and 15 languages had disappeared in Brazil alone. This was another of his recurring themes. He worried about the growth of a “mass civilization,” of a modern “monoculture.” He sometimes expressed exasperated self-disgust with the West and its “own filth, thrown in the face of mankind.”

In this seeming elevation of the savage mind and denigration of Western modernity, he was writing within the tradition of French Romanticism, inspired by the 18th-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whom Mr. Lévi-Strauss revered. It was a view that helped build Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s public reputation in the era of countercultural romanticism in the 1960s and ’70s.

But such simplified romanticism was also a distortion of his ideas. For Mr. Lévi-Strauss, the savage was not intrinsically noble or in any way “closer to nature.” Mr. Lévi-Strauss was withering, for example, when describing the Caduveo, whom he portrayed as a tribe so in rebellion against nature — and thus doomed — that it even shunned procreation, choosing to “reproduce” by abducting children from enemy tribes.

His descriptions of American Indian tribes bear little relation to the sentimental and pastoral clichés that have become commonplace. Mr. Lévi-Strauss also made sharp distinctions between the primitive and the modern, focusing on the development of writing and historical awareness. It was an awareness of history, in his view, that allowed the development of science and the evolution and expansion of the West. But he worried about the fate of the West. It was, he wrote in The New York Review of Books, “allowing itself to forget or destroy its own heritage.”

With the fading of myth’s power in the modern West, he also suggested that music had taken on myth’s function. Music, he argued, had the ability to suggest, with primal narrative power, the conflicting forces and ideas that lie at the foundation of society.

But Mr. Lévi-Strauss rejected Rousseau’s idea that humankind’s problems derive from society’s distortions of nature. In Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s view, there is no alternative to such distortions. Each society must shape itself out of nature’s raw material, he believed, with law and reason as the essential tools.

This application of reason, he argued, created universals that could be found across all cultures and times. He became known as a structuralist because of his conviction that a structural unity underlies all of humanity’s mythmaking, and he showed how those universal motifs played out in societies, even in the ways a village was laid out.

For Mr. Lévi-Strauss, for example, every culture’s mythology was built around oppositions: hot and cold, raw and cooked, animal and human. And it is through these opposing “binary” concepts, he said, that humanity makes sense of the world.

This was quite different from what most anthropologists had been concerned with. Anthropology had traditionally sought to disclose differences among cultures rather than discovering universals. It had been preoccupied not with abstract ideas but with the particularities of rituals and customs, collecting and cataloguing them.

Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s “structural” approach, seeking universals about the human mind, cut against that notion of anthropology. He did not try to determine the various purposes served by a society’s practices and rituals. He was never interested in the kind of fieldwork that anthropologists of a later generation, like Clifford Geertz, took on, closely observing and analyzing a society as if from the inside. (He began “Tristes Tropiques” with the statement “I hate traveling and explorers.”)

To his mind, as he wrote in “The Raw and the Cooked,” translated from “Le Cru et le Cuit” (1964), he had taken “ethnographic research in the direction of psychology, logic, and philosophy.”

In radio talks for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in 1977 (published as “Myth and Meaning: Cracking the Code of Culture”), Mr. Lévi-Strauss demonstrated how a structural examination of myth might proceed. He cited a report that in 17th-century Peru, when the weather became exceedingly cold, a priest would summon all those who had been born feet first, or who had a harelip, or who were twins. They were accused of being responsible for the weather and were ordered to repent, to correct the aberrations. But why these groups? Why harelips and twins?

Mr. Lévi-Strauss cited a series of North American myths that associate twins with opposing natural forces: threat and promise, danger and expectation. One myth, for example, includes a magical hare, a rabbit, whose nose is split in a fight, resulting, literally, in a harelip, suggesting an incipient twinness. With his injunctions, the Peruvian priest seemed aware of associations between cosmic disorder and the latent powers of twins.

Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s ideas shook his field. But his critics were plentiful. They attacked him for ignoring history and geography, using myths from one place and time to help illuminate myths from another, without demonstrating any direct connection or influence.

In an influential critical survey of his work in 1970, the Cambridge University anthropologist Edmund Leach wrote of Mr. Lévi-Strauss: “Even now, despite his immense prestige, the critics among his professional colleagues greatly outnumber the disciples.”

Mr. Leach himself doubted whether Mr. Lévi-Strauss, during his fieldwork in Brazil, could have conversed with “any of his native informants in their native language” or stayed long enough to confirm his first impressions. Some of Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s theoretical arguments, including his explanation of cannibals and their tastes, have been challenged by empirical research.

Mr. Lévi-Strauss conceded that his strength was in his interpretations of what he discovered and thought that his critics did not sufficiently credit the cumulative impact of those speculations. “Why not admit it?” he once said to an interviewer, Didier Eribon, in “Conversations with Lévi-Strauss” (1988). “I was fairly quick to discover that I was more a man for the study than for the field.”

Claude Lévi-Strauss was born on Nov. 28, 1908, in Belgium to Raymond Lévi-Strauss and the former Emma Levy. He grew up in France, near Versailles, where his grandfather was a rabbi and his father a portrait painter. His great-grandfather Isaac Strauss was a Strasbourg violinist mentioned by Berlioz in his memoirs. As a child, he loved to collect disparate objects and juxtapose them. “I had a passion for exotic curios,” he says in “Conversations.” “My small savings all went to the secondhand shops.” A large collection of Jewish antiquities from his family’s collection, he said, was displayed in the Musée de Cluny; others were looted after France fell to the Nazis in 1940.

From 1927 to 1932, Claude obtained degrees in law and philosophy at the University of Paris, then taught in a local high school, the Lycée Janson de Sailly, where his fellow teachers included Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. He later became a professor of sociology at the French-influenced University of São Paulo in Brazil.

Determined to become an anthropologist, he began making trips into the country’s interior, accompanied by his wife, Dina Dreyfus, whom he married in 1932. “I was envisaging a way of reconciling my professional education with my taste for adventure,” he said in “Conversations,” adding: “I felt I was reliving the adventures of the first 16th-century explorers.”

His marriage to Ms. Dreyfus ended in divorce, as did a subsequent marriage, in 1946, to Rose-Marie Ullmo, with whom he had a son, Laurent. In 1954 he married Monique Roman, and they, too, had a son, Matthieu. Besides Laurent, Mr. Lévi-Strauss is survived by his wife and Matthieu as well as Matthieu’s two sons.

Mr. Lévi-Strauss left teaching in 1937 and devoted himself to fieldwork, returning to France in 1939 for further study. But on the eve of war, he was drafted into the French Army to serve as a liaison with British troops. In “Tristes Tropiques,” he writes of his “disorderly retreat” from the Maginot Line after Hitler’s invasion of France, fleeing in cattle trucks, sleeping in “sheep folds.”

In 1941, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was invited to become a visiting professor at the New School for Social Research in New York, with help from the Rockefeller Foundation. He called it “the most fruitful period of my life,” spending time in the reading room of the New York Public Library and befriending the distinguished American anthropologist Franz Boas.

He also became part of a circle of artists and Surrealists, including Max Ernst, André Breton and Sartre’s future mistress, Dolorès Vanetti. Ms. Vanetti, who shared his “passion for objects,” Mr. Lévi-Strauss said in “Conversations,” regularly visited an antique shop on Third Avenue in Manhattan that sold artifacts from the Pacific Northwest, leaving Mr. Lévi-Strauss with the “impression that all the essentials of humanity’s artistic treasures could be found in New York.'

After the war, Mr. Lévi-Strauss was so intent on pursuing his studies in New York that he was given the position of cultural attaché by the French government until 1947. On his return to France, he earned a doctorate in letters from the University of Paris in 1948 and was associate curator at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris in 1948 and 1949. His first major book, “The Elementary Structures of Kinship,” was published in 1949. (Several years later, the jury of the Prix Goncourt, France’s most famous literary award, said that it would have given the prize to “Tristes Tropiques,” his hybrid of memoir and anthropological travelogue, had it been fiction.)

After the Rockefeller Foundation gave the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris a grant to create a department of social and economic sciences, Mr. Lévi-Strauss became the director of studies at the school, remaining in the post from 1950 to 1974.

Other positions followed. From 1953 to 1960, he served as secretary general of the International Social Science Council at Unesco. In 1959, he was appointed professor at the Collège de France. He was elected to the French Academy in 1973. By 1960, Mr. Lévi-Strauss had founded L’Homme, a journal modeled on The American Anthropologist.

By the 1980s, structuralism as imagined by Mr. Lévi-Strauss had been displaced by French thinkers who became known as poststructuralists: writers like Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes and Jacques Derrida. They rejected the idea of timeless universals and argued that history and experience were far more important in shaping human consciousness than universal laws.

“French society, and especially Parisian, is gluttonous,” Mr. Lévi-Strauss responded. “Every five years or so, it needs to stuff something new in its mouth. And so five years ago it was structuralism, and now it is something else. I practically don’t dare use the word ‘structuralist’ anymore, since it has been so badly deformed. I am certainly not the father of structuralism.”

But Mr. Lévi-Strauss’s version of structuralism may end up surviving post-structuralism, just as he survived most of its avatars. His monumental four-volume work, “Mythologiques,” may ensure his legacy, as a creator of mythologies if not their explicator.

The final volume ends by suggesting that the logic of mythology is so powerful that myths almost have a life independent from the peoples who tell them. In his view, they speak through the medium of humanity and become, in turn, the tools with which humanity comes to terms with the world’s greatest mystery: the possibility of not being, the burden of mortality."

Facebook | Sreejith V T Nandakumar: K. Satchidanandan on V T Nandakumar.

2009-11-03T17:51:00.000+05:30

Facebook | Sreejith V T Nandakumar: K. Satchidanandan on V T Nandakumar.: "Samakalika Malayalam, 23rd June 2000:

'NANDETTAN'

by
Satchidanandan

V T Nandakumar was a writer caught between heaven and Hades.

I stood witness to the ashes that were once Nandettan, floating over one of the tiny lakes, scattered as shattered memories of the pristine immensities of Bharatha Puzha in Thiru Navaaya. Along with my sister, brother and the children of Nandettan. I don’t know what was the final prayer those ashes made to that liquid Sita, which kept on threatening in silkened soft voice to vanish underneath. Was it, take my hand and lead me into the secrets of earth? Or, perhaps, sour my sublime soul to the unknowns beyond the skies?

Nandettan, better known as V T Nandakumar was an artist caught between heaven and Hades.

My close encounter with a writer for the first time was through Nandettan. I was witness to his rise, fall and resurrection.

I remember that leisurely afternoon when Nandettan had come to our home in Pullut, crossing the courtyard where sun had spread its carpet, hibiscus and basil bloomed in smiles. My father was resting in the armchair, reading the Express daily. Someone whom youth had not quite divorced yet; someone with straight hair, shining face and seemingly dreamy eyes because of their slightly veiled iris. Someone who was, on our family scale, tall. Since I was a regular reader of Jayakeralam, I was familiar with his writing. It was hard to believe that this man with a child-like innocence was the one behind those works: because all of them were permeated with a sense about evil. It was only later, in the sixties of modernity, that an omniscience of this kind about the diabolic had manifested in Malayalam literature.

It was Basheer and Uroob who were Nandettan’s favorite Malayalam novelists. To the best of my knowledge, he was friends with them as well. I came to know him better after he had got married to my sister. I was sixteen or seventeen. A season when poetry was gushing forth and I was translating Shelley, Keats, Omar Khayyam and Wordsworth. But I was not very familiar with contemporary European literature. It was Nandettan who had introduced Sartre, Kafka and Camus to me. His other picks were Hemingway, Steinbeck, Flaubert and Stendhal.

It is heard that Nandettan was one of the first communists in Kodungallur. He was close friends with E. Gopala Krishna Menon, K.V.K Varrier, C. Achyutha Menon and their ilk. ‘Naalathe Mazhavillu’ vividly describes those days. It was “Raktham Illatha Manushyan’ that had catapulted Nandettan to fame. I have always felt it could have been a masterpiece.

Nandettan was working at the ‘Employees Insurance Corporation’ when he married my sister. He had to put up with a lot in the capacity if a trade union leader. After working in Thrissur, Kannur and Kottarakkara, finally he put in his papers. If he had received the emoluments that were to come to him is suspect. It took courage to decide to make a livelihood out of writing during those days. Life suddenly became insecure, once he lost a steady income. He had to sustain three lives. And that was only the beginning of the trials. Serial novels, initially: ‘ Daivathinte Maranam, Vandipparambanmar, Ente Karnan. In between, a fortnightly titled ‘Yaathra’ from Ernakulam. (It was in ‘Yaathra’ that I had written my first column; as well as a liberal translation of Camus’ Outsider, as suggested by Nandettan.) Then, a small treadle press in our home in Pullut. These were not, clearly, up his street. He never had the discipline or dexterity to run a business. Everyone took advantage of his good intentions. A good number of scripts for movies, many of which, hits in the box office. But even there, he failed to succeed in financial negotiations. It was my sister’s Life Insurance agency that had sustained the family. Nandettan had supported her in the profession. I have only heresay about his vagabond life before marriage and the many types of jobs that he had done, including that of a medical representative. It was this vagrant life outside Kerala that inspired his novels like Raktham Illatha Manushyan and Chattayum Malayum. I still feel they contain a certain power and courage.

Nandettan was an engaging conversationalist. He had a special flair for narrating ghost stories. Even as an adult, I had spent sleepless nights, listening to those tales. He was rather proud of my adolescent literary activities, though he had never told me directly. By and by, his maverick lifestyle settled down somewhat. The institutional responsibilities of a family reigned in that whirlwind too. I had felt he experienced immense guilt for describing Krishna in a devious way in Ente Karnan, which was anathema for my mother. Gradually, he felt it was wrong, himself. He discontinued the novel. I feel it was this guilt that had prompted him to romance Viswa Hindu Parishad. Yet, it’s my belief that he never changed his stance on this, though losing its edge a bit. It had astonished and pained me, this volte-face of Nandettan who was a Communist and a trade unionist. It seemed he had lost the art of conversation, along with this.

I had negotiated my path through the extreme left in the meanwhile. Nandettan never disputed me. He merely cautioned me when I was arrested. His Amityville was devoid of horrors, was firm and deep. An eclectic lodge. P.K. Abdul Khader, ex-Congress MP who was shot dead, Dr. Sageer, Dr. Manmohan, Ramadas Vaidyar, Dr. Siddiq, Appukkutty Gupthan who owned Jayakeralam…and others including Omcheri. I had always got only love and affection from him.

I am not sure how Nandettan had assessed himself as a writer. He had always quarreled with literary institutions and refused to repose trust in them. After growing up, we had never discussed literature. After all, we were traveling in different directions. Nandettan failed to become an acclaimed writer. But he could not compete with the Mills and Boons of Malayalam, despite switching from Kafka to English detective novels and suffering from a critical mass of agony. The truth is, he was so committed to reality. He refused to write about anything outside his first-hand knowledge. Randu Penkuttikal could have easily become pornography. But it puts forward a female bonding – not Lesbiansism – a feminine affinity. It may contain a tender and oblique Eros. But it is not at all direct same-sex lust. His model was a couple of girls who could not leave each other. I have felt that it was this realism that had always constrained him from growing beyond a certain limit. Was he the soliloquist in Andrea del Sarto by Robert Browning? An artist who had everything and yet missed out on something crucial?

This much I know: his earnest life that lived three-fourth of a century to see the dawn of the millennium speaks volumes about an artist’s fate and challenges in our times. Even his failures are eloquent – like wounds with lips."

2009-11-03T15:44:00.000+05:30

http://indiatoday.intoday.in/site/Video/68804/42/An+enigma+called+Indira.html

amitvarma | TweetPhoto

2009-11-03T06:07:00.003+05:30

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Dumb Down Dotcom | OPEN Magazine

2009-10-28T16:03:00.000+05:30

Dumb Down Dotcom | OPEN Magazine

http://jkneilson.wordpress.com/2009/10/25/amitava-kumar/

2009-10-27T14:40:00.001+05:30

http://jkneilson.wordpress.com/2009/10/25/amitava-kumar/

2009-10-26T19:33:00.000+05:30

http://jkneilson.wordpress.com/2009/10/25/amitava-kumar/

The mark of a good Columnist : Medium Term

2009-10-22T05:19:00.002+05:30

The mark of a good Columnist : Medium Term

AddThis - Service Details - Blogger

2009-09-29T16:37:00.001+05:30

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Quite amuzed!!

2009-09-22T18:30:00.001+05:30

"WE TWO" RECALL THE BRAND NAME OF THE OLD MATCH BOX

2009-09-17T15:01:00.002+05:30

Anandan Sivamani...

2009-08-19T17:32:00.001+05:30

Anandan Sivamani (born 1959), popularly known as Sivamani, is a percussionist based in India. He plays many instruments including drums, Octoban, Darbuka, Udukai, and Kanjira, as well as many more. He has a huge fan following in India, and is an extremely creative percussionist. He recently performed drumming during the IPL Championships in 2008. Although he was affliated to the Chennai Super Kings team, he kept all the spectators enthralled.

Beyond the Years

2009-07-30T20:14:00.005+05:30

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sW0WA_rXW2w

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZKOWxXZpiE

Beyond the Years (Cheon nyeon hak) (2007) is a South Korean film. Celebrated director Im Kwon-taek's 100th film, it is based on the novel The Wanderer of Seonhakdong, and was presented at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival.[2] Despite being an informal sequel to Im's phenomenally successful Sopyonje (1993), Beyond the Years was not popular with Korean audiences.[3] Beyond the Years is the story of Dong-ho, a pansori drummer who returns to his childhood village in search of his blind stepsister, Song-hwa.

Beyond the Years" is a love story between a female traditional Korean pansori singer and a male drummer who are not actually blood-related but have been brought up as sibling. The story uses Korean scenery for its background. The movie was also produced by Im, who became the country's "All-Korean director" after his "Sopyonje," which overwhelmed the critics.

After Him

2009-07-29T08:44:00.011+05:30

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DUxkC0M5RVc
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_xTBiGyHxnk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sx29deBYL2E

It’s an intense tale of a mother’s grief after the accidental death of her 20-year- old soDuration: 81 minsGenre: DramaDirector: Gaël MorelLead actor: Catherine Deneuve.
DENEUVE plays Camille, the mother. After her son’s death Camille focuses on her son’s best friend Franck, (THOMAS DUMERCHEZ), who was actually driving the car when the accident occurred. There’s an intensity in her that veers towards obsession.AFTER HIM never quite delivers in terms of drama although there’s a tremendous reality to the sadness. Co-writer/director Gael Morel seems to be satisfied with creating an unsettled mood to the film, garnering terrific performances from his cast in the process.But the film doesn’t go very much beyond the rather superficial premise that Camille is determined that Franck fulfil the promise that has been denied to her son.It’s all very European in style, particularly the ending, but there’s a sense of something missing here and it isn’t grief.
review
Catherine Deneuve is not just an actress but a country. For those of a certain (or even uncertain) age, she embodies an idea of France - incredible elegance, a touch of haughtiness, a sophistication that could only come from Paris, clad in YSL and her own fragrance. Untouchable, unworldly, flawless.
In the 1960s, she was the belle du jour, the face that every director and leading actor wanted to have - in every sense. She played whores and killers, vampires and gold-diggers, actresses and princesses and, later, even an American factory worker (in Lars von Trier's oddball Dancer In The Dark). In the 1980s, she became the official visage for Marianne, the symbol of France. La Reine Catherine, the French ideal.
That can be hard to live up to. Maintaining a legendary face takes work and it's a battle you can't win. Age shall weary them and the years condemn. Deneuve is now 64 and her face has begun to disobey her commands. I don't know if she has had facelifts, nor care, but I think there's less expression in her face than there once was. And no, I don't think that's always true of older actors - some become more expressive as they age, because they are better actors.
Then again, in this case, it may be the performance. Deneuve has always been good at coldly minimal roles. She has said that directors often have to get her to ramp her performance up, rather than down, because she tends to underplay. In this movie, it's the other way around: she starts huge and then keeps reducing the emotions, until she's almost completely inscrutable. It's an intriguing performance because it's like an attempt to erase the character. Maybe that's part of the attraction for Deneuve. Who would blame her, after almost 50 years in the footlights, for playing a woman who wants to become invisible?
The film is about grief, a tricky subject. Everyone knows a little about it and most of us have seen it done badly on film. At one end you get floods of tears; at the other, cold fury, with barren bleakness in between. Few films manage the gravity of it without becoming histrionic; once they succumb to that, it's all over. Life's too short to watch other people's unconvincing grief. If you're going to go after it, you'd better nail it. Anything less is pretentious.
For the first couple of reels of Apres Lui, the story of a woman whose son has been killed in a car accident, I was unconvinced. The director Gael Morel ( Le Clan) just seems to do the obvious but without clarity. The opening shows two young men horsing around as they dress in women's clothes. Deneuve breezes in wearing jeans and helps them with their make-up

They could be gay, except they talk about girls. It turns out they are going to a buck's party. Next thing, the phone rings and Camille (Deneuve) is told her son is dead. Apparently the French police do this sort of thing over the phone. She begins to wail, then calls her daughter Laure (Elodie Bouchez), to tell her. The crying continues through the identification of the body at the hospital with her ex-husband Francois (Guy Marchand), and the bleak funeral. En route to the wake Camille stops by the tree where her son Mathieu (Adrien Jolivet) died. She finds his friend Franck (Thomas Dumerchez) sitting there with a bunch of flowers, crying. She takes him to the wake. Both Laure and her father attack him for coming but Camille will not let them throw him out. So begins the relationship that will become the most important in Camille's life.
Morel, who was an actor in Andre Techine's wonderful 1994 film Wild Reeds, makes few concessions to clarity or brevity in these scenes. The light is so dim in the opening scene that I didn't recognise Franck as the same boy - the one who dressed up with Mathieu. That made it momentarily difficult to work out why people were so hostile to him at the wake. Morel withholds the news that Franck drove the car. Everyone on screen knows it but the audience is kept in the dark - literally. This is an unusual technique but characteristic of a certain kind of French film, in which keeping the audience informed is akin to pandering.
The combination of the twilight gloom and the depiction of grief as simple weeping just about did me in but then the film changes. Camille stops crying and begins to pursue her friendship with Franck. She goes to the university, where both young men were studying, to find out about his grades. She pursues his parents, who are migrants from Portugal, to ensure he returns to class. She gives him a job in her bookshop to provide a stipend. The cameraman is allowed to use lights, too.
The effect is to save the film and set it off in the direction Morel was always intending, towards mystery. This gives Deneuve something to do, as Camille tries to reconnect with her son's energy through Franck. The longer the film goes, the more nuanced the performance becomes. Deneuve convinces us that Camille's grief is getting worse, not better, and her awareness of what she's doing is receding, rather than improving. The more unhinged she becomes, the quieter and more moving Deneuve's performance.
As I say, it's hard to know how much of her stony visage is acting and how much is the result of what we might call maintenance. I think it's mostly the former but either way, it works pretty well for this role.

Gayatri,the playback singer

2009-07-28T22:05:00.018+05:30

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EP7JsGVfUu0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ls5xwbhR_XY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DRbUpO3UQKg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Ra30EBb2M0

http://gayatriasokan.info/

Gayatri Asokan started her playback career with the song "Deena Dayalo Rama" for the film "Arayannagalude Veedu" under music director Raveendran. "Enthe Nee Kanna" for "Sasneham Sumitra" won her the Kerala State award for the best female playback singer in 2003. Her memorable hits include "Chanjadi Adi" from "Makalkku", & "Thumbikkinnaram" from "Naran" the Mohanlal starrer. She has also sung a song in the V. K Prakash Movie "Moonnamathoral" which was released recently.

Gayathri was first trained in Carnatic music by Sri Mangat Natesan and Sri Vamanan Namboodiri at Trichur. Later she started training in Hindustani Music under "Dr. Alka Deo Marulkar" in Pune and later under "Pandit Vinayaka Torvi" in Bangalore which she is continuing. A person who has influenced Gayatri a lot is Sri Sri Ravi Shankar. She is an active member of the Art of living foundation.
She is also a Hindustani classical music singer, a Bhajan singer and has given Hindustani concerts and programs based on film songs abroad. She has sung in many Albums and has also sung and given music for a new Album for the Art of Living foundation which is to be released in September 2006 by HMV worldwide. She has also shared the stage with eminent singers like Yesudas, Jayachandran, SP Balasubramanyam, S. Janaki, Shankar Mahadevan, Madhu Balakrishnan and Pradip Somasundaran. She recently sang for a music album of music maestro Ilayaraja, Thiruvasagam which was released by Sony Music.

Gayathri and Vidhu Pratap on music and More
`Work hard, be happy'

It is a euphonious duet when two award winning playback singers get together. There is not a single discordant note in their conversation. As Gayathri Ashokan and Vidhu Pratap get together for a Take Two interview, there is fun, banter and above all music. Gayathri, who hit the limelight with her soulful song `Deenadayalo Rama... ' in `Arayanagalude Veedu' won the Kerala State Award for her song `Endee Nee Kannaa' in the movie `Sasneham Sumithra.'
Vidhu, who was selected as the first `Voice of the Year' award in a music competition conducted by a private channel in 1997-98 made waves with his songs in `Meesa Madhavan,' `Swapnakoodu' and the song `Sukamanee Nilavu' in `Nammal.' He won the State award for the best male playback singer in 2000. Saraswathy Nagarajan and Bimal Sivaji record.
Two lines of an impromptu `oppana' sung by Vidhu welcome Gayathri to Vidhu's house in Kaithumukku. Gayathri is getting married to Sai, a dentist in Kozhikode, on January 4.
Vidhu: So, you are going to lose all you fans.
Gayathri: My fans enjoy my songs. Getting married has nothing to do with it. How about you?
Vidhu: I am not old enough to get married. I am only 24 (laughs).
Gayathri: Let us talk about music.
Vidhu: I am just back after a recording in Kochi for a movie. It began at 12.30 a.m. After the first recording was over at 3.00 a.m., I went back, slept and returned to the studio at 6 a.m. But I did not feel tired. It was quite alright. However, on the way back, I was feeling very sleepy.
Gayathri: Rehman also does most of his work at night. I had been to see the rushes of Jairaj's film `Makalku.' Quite a few singers have sung for the movie. Hariharan, Adnan Sami, Jassie Gift and Manjari have also sung for the movie.
Vidhu: Will you continue as a playback singer after your marriage.
Gayathri: Yes. My fiancée does not have a problem about that.
Vidhu: Is it an arranged marriage?
Gayathri: Yes. The horoscopes were matched...
Vidhu: I believe in horoscopes too. But difficult to predict what kind of a marriage I will have...
Gayathri: Let us talk about you. When did you decide to be a singer? You sing a number of Tamil songs and your diction and pronunciation are pucca. What I like about your songs is that you have an individual style and never try to mimic anyone.
Vidhu: Well, my mother Laila hails from Amaravila. A lot of people there speak Tamil. Perhaps that is why my Tamil is good. As a student, I was not into music alone. During my school days in Christ Nagar, I used to participate in monoacts, mimicry and singing. So, I was not exposed to too much of songs. Like many kids, I was also learning Carnatic music. My first teacher was Sreekanteswaram Saraswathy Ambal. Now my guru is B. Sasikumar. It was after I won the Voice of the Year Award that I seriously thought about becoming a singer.
Father's pride
Gayathri: I have heard that your father, Prathapan, is the person who really motivated you to become a singer.
Vidhu: Yes. Ninety per cent of the effort was my father's. He backed me and encouraged and, most importantly, supported me financially. After I won the `Voice of the Year' award, I got some offers to sing for concerts. I first sang for a movie called `Paadamudra' when I was in Class IV. My first real break was `Devadasi.' I have a song in `Rasikan.' When did you decide to become a singer. You come from a family of musicians.
Gayathri: But I was not focussed like you people. I used to enjoy music a great deal and was learning Carnatic music. My grandmother, Ammukutty, was a good singer and my Valliamma (mother's sister) used to play the veena beautifully. She was a professor at Stella Marris in Chennai. Then, when I was doing my BA, I became a great fan of Hariharan and that is when I decided that I had to learn Hindustani music. I went to Pune as my guru Alka Marulkar was staying there. I stayed there to learn Hindustani.
Vidhu: Don't you think that Hariharan's ghazals and songs had a great influence in making Hindustani music so popular in Kerala?
Gayathri: Absolutely. He has a great voice and moreover since he is a South Indian, a lot of people were able to relate to him better. How did you take care of your voice? I have heard that male singers go through a difficult phase when their voice breaks.
Vidhu: It is very difficult and frustrating. You not sure whether to begin on a high or low note. Suddenly, in the middle, your voice lets you down. That was a difficult period.
Gayathri: During that time, doing the wrong riyaz could damage your voice.
Vidhu: During that time Vazhuthacaud Sunil, who had passed his Ghanabhooshanam was not too busy then. He used to come at 5 a.m. and I had to get up and practise. Sometimes I used to get angry as I had to get up early. But now I feel that was good for my voice.
Gayathri chechi, you have a younger brother?
Gayathri: His name is Ganesh and he is an engineer.
Vidhu: Ask Gayathri chechi what she calls her father? Neshu. And do you know what they call their mother? Nunia (Gayathri laughs out loud). That is the language in their house. Her father's real name is Ashokan.
Gayathri: From Ashokan it first became `Ashu' then it became Neshu.
Vidhu: They have such short forms for many such things. I was able to decipher her language only after working with her for four or five years.
Gayathri: We have done a number of stage shows together and they are usually a hit. Is it not Vidhu? Vidhu dances... Vidhu: She will not ...
Gayathri: I don't dance to impress anybody.
Vidhu: When we do a show it is for the audience.
Gayathri: But that does not mean you `work out' on the stage. He even tried to moon walk.
Vidhu: I try to entertain the audience.
Gayathri: Have you learnt dancing?
Favourite songs
Vidhu: For some time. The audience enjoy our concerts. I like Gayathri chechi's songs such as `Deendayalo' and `Endee Nee Kanna.' The song that won her the award...
Gayathri: As soon as I heard `Sukamanee... ' during a stage show, I was attracted to that song. It is a very romantic one and the song creates a mood. Vidhu: Gayathri, don't you sing fast numbers?
Gayathri: Only if I get fast numbers.
Vidhu: There is one thing. One is lucky to get to sing melodies.
Gayathri: Have you planned your career?
Vidhu: Mine is a not a planned life at all.
Gayathri: But you should have planned something in secret?
Vidhu: That has to remain a secret. There is nothing like that. I don't know how long I will be able to stay on in this field. I wish to be in the field for a long time. Then there is enough competition in this field. Work hard and be happy.
Vidhu: If the husband and wife are from the same profession, there would be problems. I would prefer her to be in some other profession. So what is your ambition?
Gayathri: Talking about my ambition, well, I have spent time and energy to go to Bangalore and learn Hindustani music. My guru is Pandit Vinayak Torvi. Right now, I want to be a singer. Maybe later, when I mature as a singer I may set up a school.

Gayathri’s Mantra

Playback singer Gayathri Asokan’s interests go beyond music. But she tells Saraswathy Nagarajan that her goal is to become a Hindustani vocalist.

"Yes, films have given me a great deal of exposure and I do enjoy my assignments. But in another six or seven years, I want to become a competent Hindustani vocalist,” asserts the student of Bangalore-based Hindustani vocalist Vinayak Torve and Alka Marulakar. She adds that she furthers her learning by tuning in to all kinds of music on youtube. “I think the Net is a fantastic place for any serious student of music. Indian classical, Western, Jazz , ghazals, rock, instrumental… there is so much that is easily available,” smiles Gayathri.

Avid reader

Gayathri’s taste in literature is equally Catholic. “I enjoy a wide range of books and authors. I am a fan of Milan Kundera. But my all-time favourites are Latin American authors, particularly Mario Vargas Llosa, Jose Saramago, Marques… Of Llosa’s books, ‘Way to Paradise,’ which delves into the life of artist Paul Gauguin, is a particular favourite. It is about the angst, elation and intensity of being an artist; a little like Somerset Maugham’s ‘The Moon and the Sixpence,’ but I find this much deeper,” says Gayathri with the passion and enthusiasm of a true bibliophile.

The literature postgraduate says airports are a great place to pick up books. “Some of them turn out be trash but I have also discovered some gems,” adds Gayathri, an avid traveller thanks to her concerts and stage programmes. Her sojourns to different places on the globe have also whetted the foodie in her.

“A vegetarian foodie who did not know how to cook,” laughs Gayathri. She says she used to feel “very unfeminine” as she equated cooking as something all women did and to her dismay she could not cook even a single dish.

“Usually, it a shishya who looks after the guru. But in my case, it was my gurus, both excellent cooks, who kept feeding me all kinds of goodies. Recently, my parents built a traditional house near Mulamkunnathukavu and I go there for a break. I do riyaz, go for long walks in the countryside, watch the grass grow and cook simple dishes. I enjoy cooking now,” says Gayathri with all the zeal of the newly initiated.

However she adds that the kitchen is not where she hangs out in Thrissur. “Jyotsna (playback singer) and I are great pals and cine buffs. We love watching all the latest Bollywood flicks. I have another group of friends in Bangalore. We hangout in restaurants, play snooker… I try to spend a few days in Bangalore every month as both my gurus are there,” says Gayathri, a disciple of Sri Sri Ravi Shankar.
Musical journey

Tracing her evolution as a singer, Gayathri says although music is in her genes with two trained Carnatic musicians (her grandmother Ammukutty and aunt Thulasi) in her family, she used to see it as a hobby and not a vocation.

“I used to win several prizes for music during my student days. My plan was to do a post graduation in management or mass communication and perhaps take up a job after that,” recounts Gayathri. “But,” she adds laughing, “while still in college I joined a band that used to belt out film songs for various stage programmes in and around Thrissur. It was considered pretty scandalous then.”

It was during the same time that the late Philip Francis, a ghazal singer and tabla player, introduced her to Hindustani music and that “made me yearn to learn Hindustani.” Gayathri remembers meeting Alka Marulkar after a concert in Kochi. “I requested her to make me her student. She told me to sing a bhajan and that must have given her hope for she told me to come to Pune to learn in the gurukul tradition.”

Philip was again the one who introduced her to music director Raveendran Master during a short vacation in Thrissur, her home town. That led the way to filmdom. “After that I began to get many assignments in Kerala and found it difficult to continue in Pune. Luckily, I found Vinayak Torve and so I was able go on with my lessons,” explains Gayathri.

The singer has already composed the song in her album ‘Vishuddhi.’ Her ambition is make a mark in world music and as a classical singer. And a role on the silver screen?

“Well, there is a shot of me singing in ‘Madhavenal’ and I have also dubbed for a short film ‘Chaulatayude Baaki.’ But, as an actor, well, I have not made up my mind. My focus is all on my music,” says Gayathri

Umayalpuram K. Sivaraman

2009-07-24T15:16:00.009+05:30

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TN5OlSbbgfM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C1XIEioSv9U
Umayalpuram K. Sivaraman -Mrudangam Vidwan
Born on 17-12-1935,in Tanjore. His father, a medical practitioner and himself an accomplished musician, had with insight and intuition nurtured the inborn talents of his son and got him rightly initiated into mrudangam .
Sri Sivaraman learnt this divine art under four great and illustrious masters: Sri Arupathi Natesa Iyer, Sri Tanjavoor Vaidyanatha Iyer, Sri Palghat Mani Iyer, Sri Kumbakonam Rangu Iyengar. The pursuit of this art under the gurukula system for well over fifteen years did not deter him to qualify for law. He is a double graduate of The University of Madras (B.A., B.L.).
Behind the professional glory and mastery of Umayalpuram Sivaraman lies a massive substratum of toil and training. Even as a three year old kid, Sivaraman revealed his ‘laya sense’ playing his fingers on whatever objects they chanced to touch upon and producing diverse ‘talas’ and such an act fetched him the gift of a kanjira from his grandmother. As a boy of ten, Sivaraman had his ‘arangetram’ (first concert) and the debut was held in the precincts of Kalahastheeswaraswami temple in the temple town of Kumbakonam.
His new techniques, innovations and creative ability in accompaniment, solo renditions, and jugalbandhi programmes with his North Indian counterparts have earned him a special place in the world of art, worthy of emulation by other artists. Having made his debut at a tender age of ten, Sivaraman has been in the field as a ‘top notcher’ for half a century now, accompanying a galaxy of maestros of recent past and artistes of great merit today, both vocal and instrumental.
His percussion career has been a colourful spectrum of accompaniment to a legion of musical maestros in Carnatic music – Sri Ariyakudi Ramanuja Iyengar, Sri Musiri Subramania Iyer, Sri Palladam Sanjeeva Rao, Sri Mysore Chowdiah, Sri Rajamanickam Pillai, Sri Papa Venkataramiah, Sri Dwaram Venkataswami Naidu, Sri Mudikondan Venkatarama Iyer, Sri G. N. Balasubramaniam, Sri Madurai Mani Iyer, Sri Maharajapuram Viswanatha Iyer, Sri Alathur Brothers, Sri Chembai Vaidyanatha Bhagavathar, Dr Semmangudi Srinivasa Iyer, Dr M. Balamuralikrishna, Sri Nedunuri Krishnamurthi, Sri Voleti Venkateswarulu, Sri S. Balachander, Sri T.R. Mahalingam, etc. He has to his credit several jugalbandhi concerts with the top artistes of Hindustani music like Pt. Ravishankar, Sri Hariprasad Chaurasia, Pt. Ram Narain and top tabla artistes like Pt. Kishen Maharaj, Pt. Samta Prasad, Ustad Allah Rakha, Mr. Zakhir Hussain and others. In these concerts, Sivaraman has won great approbation from his North Indian Counterparts and the audience.
Besides his professional career, he had undertaken the very laudable task of doing original research in the art of mrudangam. This resulted in his highly acclaimed lecture demonstrations done in all important centres in India and abroad, which enabled him to disseminate knowledge of this divine art to art lovers, music conferences, music seminars and the like. He is the only mrudangam vidwan who has explored and placed before the world of art lovers authentic information on the techniques and nuances of mrudangam for more than two decades. He has introduced the fibre glass mrudangam to Carnatic music for the first time, improvised a mechanical jig to eliminate human error in the moulding of skins for both sides of the instrument and has done research work on tanned and untanned skins for the mrudangam. His analysis of the ingredients of the black patch has given much insight on the overtones produced by different strokes on the mrudangam.
Sri Sivaraman has contributed informative articles on mrudangam in Sri Shanmukhananda Sabha's (Bombay) Journal, Bhavan's Journal; Vadya Kala - a publication of the Development Centre for Musical Instruments, Madras (Ministry of Commerce - Handicrafts, Govt. of India) and to several other journals and publications. He has played mrudangam in several professional recordings and in the special feature 'The Drums of India', in the United States. He has also planned and played in the cassette ‘Garland of Rhythm’ which has given a new dimension to the concept of thani avarthanam (mrudangam solo). He had the unique honour of playing Tala Vadya Kutcheri-s in the Annual Film Fare festival in 1973 and 1975. He also participated in the ‘Tala Vadya Utsav’ at New Delhi in 1985 and played a jugalbandhi concert. He played mrudangam in a special programme known as ‘Mrudangam Drum Set Jugalbandhi’ in Max Muller Bhavan, Madras, along with two leading drummers from West Germany. He has served as a judge in the panel constituted by the Ministry of Education and Culture, Government of India. He has served as a judge in the All India Radio panel, for selection of artistes. He was invited to play mrudangam in the popular and successful Tamil movie 'Mrudanga Chakravarthy'. Sri Sivaraman is a ‘A’ Top Grade artiste in All India Radio and Doordarshan Television. He has presided over the Annual Music Conference of the Indian Fine Arts Society, Madras, in 1984 and was conferred the title of Sangeetha Kala Sikhamani. Sri Sivaraman has been appointed as the Director for ‘Tanjore Vaidyanatha Iyer School for Percussion’ recently started by the Music Academy, Madras.
His innovations include analysis of the ingredients of the black patch on the right side of the mrudangam, on the overtones produced from the right side drum head, synthesis of the traditional and the modern approaches in playing on the instrument, research in using tanned and untanned skins and hides of the instrument, evolving new patterns of rhythmic designs (mora-s and korvai-s), has improvised and is using a mechanical contrivance to eliminate human error in the moulding skins for mrudangam on both sides and he has made a fibre glass mrudangam and used it in concerts.
He has given lecture demonstrations at The Music Academy, Madras; Tamil Nadu Isai Kalluri; University of Madras; National Museum, New Delhi; Sri Shanmukhananda Sabha, Bombay; Karnataka Gana Kala Parishat, Bangalore; Music College, Madurai; Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan, Coimbatore; Indira Kala Viswa Vidyalaya, Khiragarh; The Conservatorium of Music, The University of Sydney; and in the United States of America etc. He has gone abroad several times on concert tours and special programmes. He has visited the USSR, USA, Canada, UK, France, West Germany, East Germany, Poland, Malaysia, Singapore, Japan, Indonesia, Bangkok, Ceylon, Muscat, Bahrain, Australia, etc. In his visit to the U.K., he participated in the Tala Vadya Kutcheri for the Festival of India, 1982, and again for the same festival in New York and Washington D.C., U.S.A., in 1985. He has also been invited to perform concerts and jazz concerts in Sri Lanka and Belgium.
When Sri Sivaraman completed 50 years of service to Carnatic music in 1996, His Excellency Shri K. R. Narayanan, Vice-President of India, honoured Sivaraman at a public function held at Madras on 10th March 1996.
He has been working for the upkeep of the traditional way of playing without sacrificing the modern impact, greater understanding, and wide appreciation for the instrument, dedication to the art of mrudangam, its propagation, and scientific improvisations in the construction of mrudangam. His mrudangam playing is considered to be in a class of its own, winning critical acclaim from the top-most musicians and music lovers.
CD's/Audio Cassettes featuring Umayalpuram Sivaraman:
1. CD recorded in Tokyo, Japan. Title: "Percussion of India" presented by Umayalpuram K Sivaraman -
World Music Library; Seven Seas; KICC 5168, King Records Co. Ltd. 2-12-13 OTOWA BUNKYO-KU TOKYO 112.Japan
2. CD recorded at Stuttgart, Germany Title :" Who's to know" - L.Shankar, Umayalpuram Sivaraman, Zakir Hussain.
Recorded by ECM Stereo 8272692 ECM records, GLEICHMANN STRABE 10 MUNCHEN 60
3. CD recorded in India Title:" Garland of Rhythm" ( By Magnasound & OMI Inc) - Solo by Umayalpuram Sivaraman.
Manufactured and marketed by OMI Music Inc, 71 Rosedale Avenue, Unit A-10, Brampton, Ontario-L6X1K4, Canada.
This CD has been produced as Ist edition and later as 2nd edition.
4. CD recorded in Brussels Title:" AKA Moon- Ganesh" , a CD dedicated by the famous Jazz band AKA Moon to
Umayalpuram Sivaraman. Sivaraman has played and composed a few pieces in this
CD. Produced and marketed by CARBON 7, 23 Eisenhower,1030, Brussels, Belgium Telephone: 32-2-2429703. Fax: 32-2-2453885
5. CD recorded in India Title: "Drums of India". Mrudangam Solo by Umayalpuram Sivaraman.
Produced and marketed by HMV(RPG Group).
The Gramaphone company of India, 6B- Nungambakkam High Road,Chennai 600034. Phone 044-8273449, 044-8274526.
e-mail: Southrm.mad@gcil.sprintrpg.ems.vsnl.net.in
6. CD Titled: "Masters of Percussion". Mrudangam Duet by Umayalpuram Sivaraman and Zakir Hussain.
Produced and marketed by Moment Records.
Moment Records, 237 Crescent Road, San Anselmo, CA 94960
7. CD recorded in Brussels Title:" AKA Moon- ELOHIM " with Umayalpuram K. Sivaraman as a guest artist
CD. Produced and marketed by CARBON 7, 23 Eisenhower,1030, Brussels, Belgium Telephone: 32-2-2429703. Fax: 32-2-2453885
8. CD Titled:" BIG BANG" - featuring a duet by Umayalpuram K. Sivaraman and Zakir Hussain
CD. Produced and marketed by Ellipsis Arts, 20 Lumber Road, Suite 1, Roslyn, NY 11576-9894

The Feelings Factory

2009-07-20T11:12:00.006+05:30

Elsa Zylberstein in The Feelings Factory: Directed by Jean-Marc Moutout.
http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=26938043
Synopsis
Eloïse, 36, is a property lawyer in Paris. Young, good-looking and successful, she is nonetheless single. To end her solitude, and because deep down she desires a love-life that she initiates and controls like her career, she signs up with a speed-dating club. After all, isn't that all about being fast and efficient, too? Seven men, seven women, seven minutes to work their charm. Then the bell rings.

Review

A thirtysomething singleton turns to speed dating as an answer to her emotional emptiness in "The Feelings Factory," a quizzical relationships dramedy elevated by a terrif central performance by Elsa Zylberstein. Not so much an examination of the speed-dating phenom -- whose touchstone pic remains last year's shamefully ignored "Shoppen" by Ralf Westhoff -- this is more a look at New Millennium me-culture, but played sympathetically without grandstanding its social subtext. It's a solid bet for upscale auds on the foreign arthouse circuit.
Main titles reminiscent of '60s pop-art pics establish a light mood as Eloise Hautier (Zylberstein), 36, is seen in confident work mode as a property lawyer at a venerable firm where she's a junior partner. However, outside work, she has little personal life beyond other professional types, so decides to try out a speed-dating agency run by the smooth Sonia (Nathaly Coualy).
Each session, held in a sanitized, retro-'60s cocktail bar, involves seven men and seven women, each getting seven minutes with each other before a bell rings. Script has some sharply written fun with these mini-encounters, with Eloise as nervous and overeager as the men she meets. But whereas "Shoppen" was almost entirely concerned with the actual speed-dating process, it's only the starting point of the main story in "Factory."
The most promising candidate seems to be Jean-Luc (Bruno Putzulu), a handsome, confident business-type who meets Eloise's vague demands of "the same intellectual standing." Lunch leads to dinner, which leads to great sex, and Eloise confides in a girlfriend that she's fallen in love.
Meanwhile, script slowly makes clear that Eloise herself is not all she seems. She's seeing a doctor (Palestinian actress Hiam Abbass, wasted in a cameo role) about her dizzy spells and chronic amenorrhea, and is worried she may never be able to have kids.
Parallel to this, she bumps into the seemingly least promising candidate at her speed-dating sesh -- the shy, self-critical, balding Andre (Jacques Bonnaffe). Unknown to her, he follows her back to work after their chat in a bookshop.
As she learns more about her medical condition, and the relationship with Jean-Luc starts to go cold, she spends time with the depressive Andre, who also -- in a scene that traverses an entire emotional spectrum in a few minutes -- turns out to be much more complex than she imagined.
From a very different perspective than his first feature, downsizing drama "Work Hard Play Hard" (2003), writer-director Jean-Marc Moutout shows an acute eye (and ear) for the emotional pressures on ambitious 21st-centurers who want it all on plate, now. "We've never been freer, but never more analyzed and told what to do," says one. And in one of the pic's most tender scenes, Eloise is gently told by her sick grandmother that, for her generation, marriage was always been more about family and affection than just sex and me-me self-analysis.
Pic's theme is less fresh than the way Moutout treats it, keeping the viewer as unsettled as its central character in what will happen next and juggling several emotional balls at the same time. Unexpected coda contains a neat throwaway twist.
On-screen chemistry between all the players is easy and convincing, with Zylberstein deftly maneuvering her way through the film's quicksand moods and avoiding playing simply a ditz. Technical package is thoroughly pro.

FRATRICIDE

2009-07-19T22:06:00.004+05:30

Through its careful accumulation of details and the rough truths of its handheld camera movements, FRATRICIDE creates a poetic dimension to balance and illuminate its dire narrative. Xewat Gectan, as Ibo, is heartbreaking in a way that American child actors never manager to be. Rather than confront racial intolerance on the glib level of an American treatment such as CRASH, it cuts straight into the heart, with crisp direction and a profoundly human eloquence.” – Steve Dollar, The New York Sun“In its particulars – the director’s feel for character and space, as well as the sterling, naturalistic performances – it’s an absorbing drama about cultural alienation that sheds light on an underclass unfamiliar to most audiences.”–
New York Magazine

A cycle of both vengeance and redemption is what Yilmaz Arslan’s film Fratricide offers anyone willing to sit down and watch. Recipient of the Locarno Film Festival’s Silver Leopard award, the film examines both the cultural isolation and tribal feuding experienced by immigrants attempting to make their way in Western Europe. Released by Koch Lorber Films, Fratricide is yet another examination of Europe’s new melting pot and the inner strife that may result accordingly.
The film follows the journey of two young Kurds attempting to survive and hopefully make their fortune in modern Germany. Azad (Erdal Celik) is Kurdish teenager who at the film’s beginning departs from his rural home in order to make his living in Germany; his journey paid for by his older brother who works as a pimp. Upon arrival in his new environment, Azad is taken in by a local youth hostel ran by local Kurdish community leaders. The hostel essentially acts as an oasis for new immigrants trying to adjust to the rather unwelcome social environment the city presents. While staying at the hostel and earning a living as a barber, Azad meets Ibo (Xevat Gectan), a young Kurdish boy whose parents were murdered in their home country.
A fast friendship soon develops between the pair as Azad looks after Ibo like a younger brother, in stark contrast to the combative relationship he has with his own older brother. Fate rears its cruel neck in however when one night the pair run into two Turkish brothers on a commuter train. After getting into a heated argument, Azad and Ibo escape but are not forgotten by the pair. Coincidentally, one of the brothers Ahmet (Oral Uyan) stumbles upon the pair again one day. A scuffle breaks out and before anyone has a chance to stop it, a murder is committed. From that point onward, the story spirals uncontrollably into a vortex of revenge and despair.
Both sides swear vengeance against the other and retribution naturally ensues, driven not only by loss but ancient tribal tensions as well. In the end, everyone loses and no one is left unscathed. While there is a glimmer of hope at the end of the tunnel, it is bittersweet at best. Like Head-On, Fratricide exists within the new Europe, a contentious melting point of diverse cultures stemming from the recent waves of immigration from the Middle East and Africa. While America has often contended with its multicultural existence, it is nowhere near as difficult as in Western Europe where centuries-old homogenous cultures now find themselves being forced to adapt outside influence.
The tension and distaste that the native societies bring upon the immigrants creates the isolated environment that only fuels further strife. In their own way, Azad and Ibo are pursuing the American Dream in trying to reinvent themselves in a new land and strike out for their own fortune. However, they also contend with taking care of their families back home financially, which the film makes a rather acidic point about. Whether it is earned working as a butcher or prostitute, money is still money and for that reason alone the families at home nor the Europeans who exploit them have no qualms over how they earn it. Despite the inflicted cruelty, Fratricide still maintains a rather innocent, humanistic core in the relationship between Azad and Ibo. Their bond is forged in the harshest of times and the love they feel for one another is palpable and touching. It only shows that no matter how horrible things can get, love is still capable of beating the most poisonous hatred.

Pakistan’s Baluch Insurgency

2009-07-17T06:46:00.007+05:30

A sophisticated armed fight for a province’s autonomy
Pakistan’s Baluch insurgency Tuesday 10 October 2006
Serious troubles have erupted in the Pakistan province of Baluchistan since the assassination of an opposition leader in August. Pressure for independence is growing in this region bordering Iran and Afghanistan, which challenges Pakistan’s authority.
by Selig S Harrison
THE slow-motion genocide being inflicted on Baluch tribesmen in the mountains and deserts of southwestern Pakistan does not yet qualify as a major humanitarian catastrophe compared with the slaughter in Darfur or Chechnya. “Only” 2,260 Baluch fled their villages in August to escape bombing and strafing by the US-supplied F-16 fighter jets and Cobra helicopter gunships of the Pakistan air force, but as casualty figures mount, it will be harder to ignore the human costs of the Baluch independence (1) struggle and its political repercussions in other restive minority regions of multi-ethnic Pakistan (2).
Already, in neighboring Sindh, separatists who share Baluch opposition to the Punjabi-dominated military regime of General Pervez Musharraf are reviving their long-simmering movement for a sovereign Sindhi state, or a Sindhi-Baluch federation, that would stretch along the Arabian Sea from Iran in the west to the Indian border. Many Sindhi leaders openly express their hope that instability in Pakistan will tempt India to help them, militarily and economically, to secede from Pakistan as Bangladesh did with Indian help in 1971.
Some 6 million Baluch were forcibly incorporated into Pakistan when it was created in 1947. This is the fourth insurgency they have fought to protest against economic and political discrimination. In the most bitter insurgency, from 1973 to 1977, some 80,000 Pakistani troops and 55,000 Baluch were involved in the fighting.
Iran, like Pakistan, was then an ally of the United States. Shah Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, who feared that the insurgency would spread across the border to 1.2 million Baluch living in eastern Iran, sent 30 Cobra gunships with Iranian pilots to help Islamabad. But this time Iran is not a US ally, and Iran and Pakistan are at odds. Tehran charges that US Special Forces units are using bases in Pakistan for undercover operations inside Iran designed to foment Baluch opposition to the regime of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Much of the anger that now motivates the Baluch Liberation Army (BLA) is driven by memories of Pakistani scorched earth tactics in past battles. In a climactic battle in 1974, Pakistani forces, frustrated by their inability to find Baluch guerrilla units hiding in the mountains, bombed, strafed and burned the encampments of some 15,000 Baluch families who had taken their livestock to graze in the fertile Chamalang Valley, forcing the guerrillas to come out from their hideouts to defend their women and children.
‘Indiscrimate bombing’
In the current fighting, which started in January 2005, the independent Pakistan Human Rights Commission has reported that “indiscriminate bombing and strafing” by F-16s and Cobra gunships are again being used to draw the guerrillas into the open. Six Pakistani army brigades, plus paramilitary forces totalling some 25,000 men, are deployed in the Kohlu mountains and surrounding areas where the fighting is most intense.
Musharraf is using new methods, more repressive than those of his predecessors, to crush the insurgency. In the past Baluch activists were generally arrested on formal charges and sentenced to fixed terms in prisons known to their families. This time Baluch spokesmen have reported large-scale kidnappings and disappearances, charging that Pakistani forces have rounded up hundreds of Baluch youths on unspecified charges and taken them to unknown locations.
The big difference between earlier phases of the Baluch struggle and the present one is that Islamabad has so far not been able to play off feuding tribes against each other. Equally importantly, it faces a unified nationalist movement under younger leadership drawn not only from tribal leaders but also from an emergent, literate Baluch middle class that did not exist three decades ago. Another difference is that the Baluch have a better armed, more disciplined fighting force in the BLA. Baluch leaders say that rich compatriots and sympathisers in the Persian Gulf provide money needed to buy weapons in the flourishing black market along the Afghan frontier.
President Musharraf has repeatedly accused India of supplying weapons to the Baluch insurgents and funds to Sindhi separatist groups, but has provided no evidence to back up these charges. India denies the accusations. At the same time New Delhi has issued periodic statements expressing concern at the fighting and calling for political dialogue.
India brushes aside suggestions that it might be tempted to help Sindhi and Baluch insurgents if the situation in Pakistan continues to unravel. Indian leaders say that. on the contrary, India wants a stable Pakistan that will negotiate a peace settlement in Kashmir so that both sides can wind down their costly arms race. But many India media commentators appear happy to see Musharraf tied down in Baluchistan and hope that the crisis will force him to reduce Pakistani support for extremist Islamic insurgents in Kashmir.
Unlike India, Iran has its own Baluch minority and fears Baluch nationalism. The Baluchistan People’s party, one of the leading Baluch groups in Iran, said on 5 August that a radical Shia cleric, Hojatol Ibrahim Nekoonam, recently installed as the justice minister of Iran’s Baluchistan province, has launched a campaign of military and police repression spearheaded by the Mersad clerical secret police, in which hundreds of Baluch have been rounded up and, in many cases, executed on charges of collaborating with the US.
Apart from being smaller in number, the Baluch in Iran are not as politically conscious or as well organised as those in Pakistan, and their principal leaders dismiss the idea of secession or of union with the Baluch in Pakistan. The Baluchistan People’s party is part of a coalition with groups representing other disaffected minorities in Iran — the Kurds, Azeri Turks and Khuzestani Arabs — which is seeking a federal restructuring in which Iran would retain control over foreign affairs, defence, communications and foreign trade, but cede autonomy in other spheres to three minority autonomous regions.
Goal of the insurgency
In Pakistan, where the Baluch have been radicalised by their periodic military struggles with Islamabad, many Baluch leaders believe that the goal of the insurgency should be an independent Baluchistan, unless the military regime is willing to grant the provincial autonomy envisaged in the 1973 constitution, which successive military regimes, including the present one, have nullified. What the Baluch, Sindhis, and a third, more assimilated ethnic minority, the Pashtuns, want above all is an end to the blatant economic discrimination by the dominant Punjabis.
Most of Pakistan’s natural resources are in Baluchistan, including natural gas, uranium, copper and potentially rich oil reserves. Although 36% of the gas produced in Pakistan comes from the province, Baluchistan consumes only a fraction of production because it is the most impoverished area of the country. For decades, Punjabi-dominated central governments have denied Baluchistan a fair share of development funds and paid only 12% of the royalties due to it for its gas. Similarly, the Sindhi and Pashtun areas have consistently been denied fair access to the waters of the Indus River by dam projects that channel the lion’s share of the water to the Punjab.
In a television speech on 20 July, devoted mostly to Baluchistan, Musharraf dismissed Baluch charges of economic discrimination and announced a $49.8m development programme for the province, half for roads and other infrastructure projects. The “real exploiters” of the Baluch, he said, are the tribal chieftains, known as sardars, who “have stolen development funds for themselves”. He claimed that the armed forces have been sent into Baluchistan to protect the Baluch from their leaders while development proceeds. Musharraf blamed the insurgency on the sardars, principally Akbar Bugti, who was killed on 26 August when the army blew up a cave where he was hiding. But the current insurgency is not being led by the tribal elders but by a new generation of politically conscious Baluch nationalists.
What makes negotiations on autonomy difficult are the economic issues relating to taxation and to the terms for sharing the resulting revenues from the development of oil, gas and other natural resources. In most proposals for a devolution of power to the provinces, Baluch and Sindhi leaders have argued that taxes collected by the central government should not be allocated, as at present, solely on a population basis, which favours the Punjab; instead, it has been suggested, half should be allocated on a population basis, while the rest should be distributed in accordance with the amount collected in each province. Since the provinces have equal representation in the Senate, even under the 1973 constitution, the upper chamber should be given greater powers, with the Senate, rather than the president or prime minister, empowered to dissolve a provincial legislature or to declare an emergency.
A more extreme demand is that Baluch, Pashtuns, Sindhis and Punjabis should have complete parity in both chambers of the National Assembly as well as in civil service and military recruitment, irrespective of population disparities. All factions among the minorities give priority to radically upgraded representation in the civil service and the armed forces, and all want constitutional safeguards to prevent the central government from arbitrarily removing an elected provincial government, as Prime Minister Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto did in 1973. The issue of safeguards against arbitrary central intervention is likely to be a non-negotiable one for the minorities, since they are seeking not only the substance, but also the feeling, of autonomy.
A tiny minority
The Baluch are only 3.57% of Pakistan’s 165.8 million people, and the three minorities combined claim only 33%. Yet they identify themselves with ethnic homelands that cover 72% of Pakistan’s territory. To the Punjabis, it is galling that the minorities should advance proprietary claims over such large areas. For this reason, the prospects for a restoration of the 1973 constitution appear bleak.
In the final analysis, the possibility of a constitutional compromise is inseparably linked with the overall course of the struggle for democratisation. With continued military rule, the Baluch insurgency and the growing movement for Sindhi rights will be radicalised. But it is unlikely that the Baluch could prevail militarily over Pakistani forces and establish an independent state, even with Sindhi help, unless India intervenes as part of a broader confrontation with Islamabad. The prospect in late 2006 is for a continuing, inconclusive struggle by the Baluch and Sindhis against Islamabad, that will debilitate Pakistan.
In the eyes of the Baluch and Sindhis, the US has a major share of the blame for the present crisis because US military hardware is being used to repress the Baluch insurgency, and a cornucopia of US economic aid to Islamabad since 11 September 2001 has kept Musharraf afloat. Military aid to Musharraf since 9/11, including the sale of 36 F-16s, recently approved by Congress, has totalled $900m so far, and another $600m is promised by 2009. Economic aid has not only included $3.6bn in US and US-sponsored multilateral aid but also the US-orchestrated postponement of $13.5bn in overdue debt repayments to aid donors.
Instead of pressing Musharraf for a political settlement with the minorities, as some European Union officials have done, the Bush administration has said that its ethnic tensions are an “internal matter” for Pakistan itself to resolve. Human rights organisations have called for international pressure on Musharraf to pursue a settlement, and critics in the US argue that the diversion of US-equipped Pakistani forces from the Afghan frontier to Baluchistan undermines even the limited operations against al-Qaida and the Taliban that Musharraf is pursuing in response to US pressure. Until Bush’s departure, however, the US commitment to Musharraf is likely to remain firm, barring the outside possibility that he will step down in the face of growing domestic pressure and permit former prime ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif to participate in the presidential elections scheduled for next year.
Translations >> français — Contestation indépendantiste au Baloutchistan فارسى — پاکستان، درگيراقليت هايش

October 2006

More by Selig S Harrison
* Selig S Harrison is director of the Asia Centre for International Policy, Washington, and author of ‘In Afghanistan’s Shadow: Baluch nationalism and Soviet Temptations’ (Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Washington, 1980)
(1) The Baluch speak an Iranian (Indo-European) language and are Sunni Muslims.
(2) Pakistan is made up of the provinces of Sind, Punjab, Baluchistan and the Northwest Frontier province, plus the federal capital Islamabad, federally administered territories and Kashmir (claimed by India).

The Blackboard

2009-07-17T06:29:00.005+05:30

Director: Samira Makhmalbaf

Script: Mohsen MakhmalbafSamira Makhmalbaf

Director of Photography: Ebrahim Ghafouri

Sound: Behrouz ShahamatMusic: Mohammad Reza DarvishiEdit: Mohsen Makhmalbaf

After the chemical bombing of Halabcheh in Iraq a number of Kurd refugee teachers seek for pupils who are willing to educate around the border as they carry their blackboards like Jesus’ crosses. One of them encounters a group of teenage smugglers and tries to convince them to educate as they carry their heavy backpacks full of smuggled stuff. The other teacher encounters a group of old and tired men, whom after years of migration are going to their own country to die there. But it seems that hunger and insecurity has not left and chance for the education of the generations.

The Blackboard (Script Outline)
Mohsen Makhmalbaf
(1999)

A dirt road in the heart of the mountains, day time:
Men with Kurdish costumes carrying blackboards on their backs appear from the turns and twists of the mountain road ahead. From the group, we hear a man who we’ll call “the first teacher” complaining to another teacher. He regrets becoming a teacher and having to spend the rest of his life wandering in vain, searching for students unwilling to study. A vague sound roars through the mountains. The teachers are worried. The sound is getting closer and closer. The teachers run and hide under the blackboards not to be seen by the helicopters passing over their heads. The sound of the helicopters moves away and the cry of the crows replaces it. One of the teachers, whom we’ll the second teacher, sticks his head out from the blackboard shelter and mimics the cry of the crows. The crows calm down and go away. The teacher stands up and camouflage their blackboards with mud. They continue their trail. After a while, the first and second teachers take another route and after they go a little farther, they too separate as the first teacher heads towards the villages while the second one aims at the heights hoping to find people among the shepherds who’d want to learn and would be willing to give the teacher a few loaves of bread to eat, in return of the lessons they receive.

Village road, an hour later:
The first teacher goes on to encounter an old man idling. The teacher asks him if he’d like to learn something. The old man answers by handing him a letter and asking him to read it to him. The letter is in Arabic and the Kurd teacher can’t read it, but the old man insists to know what the letter says. He tells the teacher that his son in a prisoner of war in Iraq and begs him to let him know of how his son is doing. The first teacher is finally forced to read the letter from his own imagination to give hope to the old man.

The villages, daytime:
The first teacher walks through the streets of the villages, singing and inviting the villagers, whom he hears but doesn’t see, to come take part in his class, but hears no response to his bid.

Mountain byway, (to Iran), daytime:
On his way, the second teacher sees teenage smugglers moving in a group. Asking around, he finds out that they go to Iraq everyday to bring smuggled goods back with them and thus live on the small profit they make this way. The second teacher asks them if they’d like to take part in his class, and they decline and prefer to be on the move. The second teacher suggests teaching them while walking with them. The teenagers refuse his offer and move on, but with the road being narrow, they have no alternative but to follow the teacher’s steps.

Mountain byway, (to Iraq), daytime:
Frustrated, the first teacher meets a group of old men who actually look more tired than he does. Each of them is carrying a package, and some are so old that they support themselves with the help of others. There is only one woman in this group, and she looks agitated and upset. The first teacher tries to persuade the group to let him teach them and asks in return to be fed by them, but the old men say they can’t feed themselves, much less someone else. In a corner, the teacher sees a sick old man, groaning of the pain his urinary bladder is causing him, preventing him from urinating. The first teacher offers to help him in any way he can, provided he is fed, and the old man says, “Tell me what I should do so I can urinate.” The other old men ask the teacher if he knows the way to the border, and offer to feed him if he takes them there. The first teacher accepts and joins the group. A minute later, the blackboard on the teacher’s back changes to a stretcher to carry the sick old man, with the first teacher one of the men supporting it. Meanwhile, the teacher is curious about the disturbed woman and asks around about her. He is told that the woman has been widowed and the child with her is from her late husband. He is suggested to marry her, if he really thinks himself so noble. They say that the blackboard he carries on his back is enough of a gift to offer to his bride.
Someone in the group helps the first teacher and the woman with their vows, and in its most primal from, pronounces them man and wife. The blackboard acts to separate the bridal chamber while the old man is helping her kid urinate.

The summit, same time:
The teenage smugglers learn on their bags and rest. The second teacher has found someone among them who is interested in learning how to write his own name, Ribvar.

A lake in a deep valley, same time:
The woman is busy washing her young child’s clothing. The old man groans of agony and prays to God to take his life and spare him the pain. The first teacher arranges his blackboard and the bigger rocks in the form of a chamber. The old man who urinted the couple tricks the kid into following him, leaving the couple with a chance to enjoy their privacy.
The first teacher and the woman are now alone in their chamber. The teacher looks at his wife for a while, he then takes a piece of chalk and in Kurdish, writes “I love you” on the blackboard. To teach this phrase to his wife, he spells the words for her.
The old men who initially started a game with walnuts to amuse the child are now absorbed in the game and forget all about the kid. The kid goes to the chamber and the mother uses the kid as an excuse to run out of the chamber. This shows that the woman doesn’t want her husband.
Some of the old men try to help the old man who was in pain by throwing him into the cold water of the river and splashing water on him. The old man trembles from the cold, but still cannot urinate. A fire is lit up and the old men stand around it to get warm. One old man suggests: “Even the devil would have urinated in that cold water. This man must be more evil than the devil himself.”

The stone summit, the byways, a little later:
The second teacher is training Ribvar on how to write his name. The teenager who is the leader of the group shows up and yells, “the soldiers are coming.” Everyone runs, and the teacher runs along. As the teenagers get far enough to feel safe again, the second teacher who has a blackboard on his back spells Ribvar’s name for him again. Ribvar, who is bending because of the load he carries, heads towards the blackboard on the second teacher’s back and learn to spell his name. Suddenly, a cry is heard as a teenager falls in the canyon. Minutes later, the second teacher’s blackboard is broken with the teenagers’ axes; to be used in a cast on the teenager’s broken leg. The teenagers, still scared, separate into groups to meet each other at a farther point in their path.

The fogged summit, same time:
The old men keep on going. They’re exhausted. The first teacher walks ahead of them with the blackboard on his back. The woman follows him, and the kid walks along while holding the mother’s sleeve. At a point in their path, the kid sees a rabbit running by, goes after it, and gets lost. The woman changes direction to follow her child and the teacher goes after her. The old men are now far away, and the first teacher, the woman, and the child are left by themselves. The teacher lays his blackboard on the ground and once again starts teaching the phrase “I love you”. The woman is sitting on the ground, feeding her child, and ignoring him. The lack of attention from the woman makes the teacher more and more angry; continuously grades her and gives her lower grades each time, as though intending to fail her. He ends up leaving her and walking away, but then he hears the voice of the woman who is running after him; he stops, and turns back. After getting close enough, the woman stretches her arms towards his neck only to take her child’s pants, which she had hanged on the blackboard to dry. She then hung back to the direction she came from.

The cattle route, same time:
The second teacher goes on to teach. Suddenly Ribvar and three others accompanying him throw themselves on the ground and come back crawling. After a moment, we find out that the teenagers are hiding in-between the passing cattle to escape the eyes of the guards on the border. The second teacher, with a blackboard on his back, looks like a shepherd in the herd. The teacher and the sheep pass the guards on the border. An hour later, it is time for the young girls to milk the herd. The thirsty teacher puts his hand in the way of the milk pouring into the bucket and drinks some milk from the sheep. The blackboard is leaning against the back of the second teacher and Ribvar is practicing to write his name. When he finally succeeds in writing the word “Ribvar” like the teacher had on the same blackboard, he cries of happiness “I did it, I did it, I actually wrote my name!” and is instantly killed with a bullet that roars into the air. The other teenagers run toward the mountains, but with the sound of each bullet, we see one of them fall and roll on the ground in the middle of the fleeing sheep.

A mountain close to the Iraqi Kurdistan border, same time:
The old men, scared by the sound of shooting, run and hide behind the nearest rocks. The woman who fears chemical bombing hides under the first teacher’s blackboard and pours gravel in the front of the blackboard to stop chemical bombs, while hugging her young child very hard. The old man, who tried everything but couldn’t urinate, sits in some corner and urinates in his pants. Scared, he too takes refuge under the blackboard. A moment later, they all crawl away and the woman drags her child under her while howling of fear of the chemical bombardment that would follow. The first teacher, who is holding the blackboard as a shield on top of the woman and her child’s head, tries to calm her down, hoping to reduce her fear.

The border, the last hours of day:
The group of old men with the first teacher, the woman, the child, and the old man, who couldn’t urinate, reach the border. The wind is blowing and there is fog around them. The first teacher shouts, “we’re there”. This is your home. At first, no one believes him, but they finally accept and fall down to the ground to pray God. To pay respect, they take their shoes off before crossing the borderline.
At the last moment, the man who had married the teacher and the woman comes to the teacher and convinces him to divorce her. He explains that the woman’s heart is with her dead husband, so the first teacher accepts and their divorce is pronounced. The blackboard that had been offered as a gift is put on the woman’s back while she walks away.
As the woman crosses the fogged border, one can see the words “I love you”, Which the woman never seemed to learn, on the blackboard on her back.

The Girl from Paris (2002)

2009-07-15T11:06:00.010+05:30

SYNOPSIS

The deeply expressive, down-to-earth Mathilde Seigner stars in this beautiful, scenic film as Sandrine, a 30-year-old woman who has decided to give up her career as a computer engineer in Paris to be an agriculturist. She returns to school, which is half textbook work and half hands-on farming experience . Soon after, she buys a farm in the Rhône-Alps region of France, a rugged mountainous area where the springtime views and clear air are the payoff for the intense isolated winters. There's only one hitch in Sandrine's plan: the cold and curmudgeonly former owner, Adrien (Michel Serrault), will live on the property for an additional 18 months before leaving the farm to retire. As Sandrine learns to run her new farm, coming up with business innovations of which Adrien could never have dreamed, he looks on in silent admiration but keeps his door shut to her. Finally, the two learn to communicate, teaching each other some valuable lessons. This understated film, which makes the French Alps look like paradise, shows two very lonely sides of life: Sandrine's as a young single woman who has not yet found a companion, and Adrien's as a man in his last years of life whose wife has already passed on.

The interview ofthe actress Mathilde Seigner , appeared in Telegraph (U.K)

Baby, you can drive my tractor

By Sheila Johnston
Published: 21 Jul 2002

This is the tale of two actress sisters. One, blonde, beautiful, a former model, is married to one of the world's leading directors and plays starring roles in his films. The other, brunette, is a little plainer and heavier set, but has the same sleepy almond eyes and striking, strong-boned features. Over the last few months, Emmanuelle Seigner, the blonde, has floated exquisitely up the steps of the Palais in Cannes on the arm of her husband, Roman Polanski. Meanwhile the brunette, Mathilde, has appeared as a sluttish, child-battering single mother in last month's Betty Fisher and as a trainee farmer in The Girl from Paris slaughtering a pig while whisking its blood in a bucket.

This modest film was last year's surprise sleeper hit in France, making Seigner, at 34, one of the country's most sought-after actresses. She plays a city slicker who moves to a beautiful but lonely part of the High Alps where she is hindered then reluctantly aided by the crotchety old peasant (Michel Serrault) who sells her his farm, then sticks around to watch her make a hash of it. At first she successfully uses her computing skills to market the place on the Internet as a holiday gite. But she finds survival tougher when the winter snows arrive.

We meet in a hotel in Saint Germain, the smart Rive Gauche district where Seigner grew up and still lives. The hotel brasserie is dim, elegant in a slightly threadbare way and almost empty except for a waiter flapping anxiously over a trolley of over-priced morsels. Then late and without apology, a languid figure heaves into view wearing what looks like a random assembly of chain-store tat: loose black T-shirt and culottes, clumpy brown sandals, various bits of costume jewellery, sunglasses thrust back on the top of her head. Seigner says proudly that she has a "personal stylist" but adds "I don't like complicated things in fashion. I just take the first thing that comes to hand each morning. It's a drag dressing up. Women who do that have time to waste."

She plops down lazily on a sofa, legs apart, elbows akimbo, and, in between spoonfuls of terrine washed down with Diet Coke, talks in staccato bursts punctuated with all the sighs, snorts, shrugs and moues that the French use to express that very Gallic attitude known as je m'en foutisme: the state of not caring less. Her voice is unexpectedly deep and her laugh (which is rare) throaty. While courteous, she makes no effort to project a glimmer of star quality.

"The script wasn't brilliant, but it held together," she states baldly of The Girl From Paris. "And I liked the idea of a girl who follows her dream through right to the end. The pig-killing scene wasn't my favourite. I was in a hurry to get it over. It disgusted me. But I did it."

She was unsurprised by the film's success: "I knew. I can sense what the public likes." This is said with some justification: Seigner's other recent roles, as a cynical beautician who boasts of "sex-ray vision" in Venus Institute, and as the tart-tongued wife of a man stalked by a creepy childhood friend in Harry He's Here to Help, were also both in small films by unknown directors which became big commercial hits.

The director, Christian Carion, says he cast Seigner for her "charm and sensuality", her ability to hold her own opposite Serrault, a veteran scene-stealer, and because she was one of the few actresses who would not look ridiculous behind the wheel of a tractor. "I didn't want a girl who was drop-dead gorgeous, but someone with character," he adds.

Seigner shrugs off the tasks she is called upon to perform (they also include driving a combine harvester, wielding a chainsaw and delivering two baby goats). "I did them more by instinct than through working at them. A role is a role. I don't intellectualise. I invest myself in it, but in the end je m'en fous, it's a game. I don't ask myself too many questions. I went into acting because I didn't feel like studying. I thought this was a job where I wouldn't have to work too hard. And I didn't know how to do anything much else."

At 23, she started out a little late for the nymphet roles and was, in any case, too chunky. Hardly sylph-like today, she used to be over a stone and a half heavier, until asked to lose weight for a role in 1999. "It wasn't much fun. It took will-power. But directors see me differently now." Does she consider herself beautiful? "Sometimes yes, sometimes, no, like everyone else. Actually I don't really care; it's not an obsession. Superficial things don't interest me.

'Some actresses, like Monica Bellucci, really play on that, they need that glamorous image. But not me. What counts is the credibility of the characters, especially since I play a lot of working women. What I like is when people tell me that they believe in me as a farmer, as a beautician, as a police officer. There's something very earthy about me. I'm true and simple in my acting style."

She never worried about competing with her gorgeous big sister. "Emmanuelle hasn't followed the same road at all as me. She does American films, speaks very good English, is much better known internationally. I didn't want to follow her. She had her way and I have mine." Mathilde speaks no English. "I can't be bothered to learn it. I like France, you know. I've no desire to make films anywhere else."

They live close by and visit each other often, she says. But asked, for instance, if she has seen The Pianist, Polanski's Golden Palm winning film about a musician who survived the Polish ghetto, she replies vaguely, "I know that people find it very beautiful and very interesting. It's about the Jews, all that, non? It's about him, isn't it?"

What did the family think of her sister's choice of partner? "Nothing much surprises me, and my parents are very tolerant. And if she's in love, eh bien, they respect that; there's nothing to discuss."

Mathilde's own private life is on hold after she split up with her boyfriend of three years, the comedian Laurent Gerra, last autumn. Immediately after the split, she dropped coy hints that it was because of her desire for a baby. "It's mainly a question of time. You need time to be with someone. Me, I don't have the time," she says now briskly.

Seigner is, indeed, in a hurry. She has made over 20 films in 10 years, squeezing in three assignments while The Girl For Paris went on hold for five months between its summer and winter shoots. She is currently on tour in a production of Educating Rita.

As she gets up to be photographed, the brasserie's sole other client, a man who has been desperately trying to catch her eye for the last half-hour, pounces to introduce himself. Seigner looks up at him with her bedroom eyes and treats him to one of her fabulous smiles. At that moment, and when she switches on briefly for the camera, the charm and sensuality which Carion saw in her are finally on high beam

Review Summary

Can a thirtysomething gal from the city find happiness with a goat farm and its aging overseer? Sandrine (Mathilde Seigner) is a computer expert who has successfully pursued a career in business; however, her career path was chosen to please her family more than herself, and Sandrine has decided to move away from the fast pace of city life to rural France. Hoping to put her job skills to work in a new context, Sandrine begins studying agriculture, and arranges to buy a goat farm from Adrien (Michel Serrault), an elderly farmer who is nearing retirement. Adrien will spend another year and a half at the farm in order to insure a smooth transition to Sandrine's management, but his attitude toward her speaks less of gratitude than resentment; he isn't eager to show her the workings of the farm he helped to build, and his behavior is more than a bit hostile. Using her computer skills, Sandrine creates a website that generates a whole new market for the goat cheese and fruit preserves the farm generates, which helps her win Adrien's grudging respect, and when Adrien falls ill and it looks possible he may not live out his final stay on the farm, he begins to open up to her, sharing all he knows about the farm, and a new level of admiration and trust grows between them. Une Hirondelle a Fait Le Printemps was the first feature film from writer and director Christian Carion. ~ Mark Deming, All Movie Guide
Movie Details
Title: The Girl From Paris
Running Time: 103 Minutes
Status: Released
Country: France, Belgium
Genre: Drama, Foreign

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZCwJykPDU1Y

Sorry,we didn't get a video subtitled in English.

The Grocer's Son

2009-07-13T20:17:00.006+05:30

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLG-Ou0TcDA

It is summer, and thirty-year-old Antoine is forced to leave the city to return to his family in Provence. His father is sick, so he must assume the lifestyle he thought he had shed—driving the family grocery cart from hamlet to hamlet, delivering supplies to the few remaining inhabitants. Accompanied by Claire, a friend from Paris whom he has a secret crush on, Antoine gradually warms up to his experience in the country and his encounters with the villagers, who initially seem stubborn and gruff, but ultimately prove to be funny and endearing. Ultimately, this surprise French box-office hit is about the coming-of-age of a man re-discovering life and love in the countrysideIt is summer, and thirty-year-old Antoine is forced to leave the city to return to his family in Provence.

When his father (Daniel Duval) has a heart attack and is hospitalised, thirty-year-old Antoine (Nicolas Cazalé) has to go back to the village in Provence helping his mother (Jeanne Goupil) and assume the lifestyle he thought he had shed, driving the family grocery cart from hamlet to hamlet, delivering supplies to the few remaining, mostly elderly inhabitants. Accompanied by Claire (Clotilde Hesme), a friend from Paris on whom he has a secret crush, Antoine resents being forced back to his father's orbit, and his brittle relationship with both his father and brother Francois (Stephan Guerin-Tillie) cause much conflict, while Francois has his own broken marriage to cope with. But gradually he warms up to his encounters with the villagers, while clumsily mishandling his budding relationship with Claire.

http://www.bigpondmovies.com/

Alexandra

2009-07-10T10:36:00.007+05:30

Alexandra

Director Alexander SokurovO

riginal story Alexander Sokurov

Producer Andrey SigleCo-producer Loran Danielou in association with «Rezo Productions» France with support of the Federal Agency for Culture and Cinematography of the Russian Federation and Centre National de la Cinematographie France

An old woman named Alexandra comes to the military unit to see her grandson – the officer of Russian Army, who serves in Chechnya. A long talk with her grandson - a young officer – like a complicated way to each other, a chance meeting with an unknown native woman and a walk around the “wounded” city… - all these events of the latest two days moved her heart deeply. The film tells about the delicate gist of human relations.

Critical reception
The film received positive reviews from critics, although other critics found to be slow and difficult to sit through.[

Metacritic reported the film had an average score of 84 out of 100, based on 5 reviews.

Manohla Dargis of The New York Times named it the 3rd best film of 2008[4], Michael Philllips of the Chicago Tribune named it the 6th best film of 2008 and Bill White of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer named it the 8th best film of 2008
However, David Fear of Time Out: New York wrote: "Sokurov prefers the sort of deliberate pace that tests ADD-afflicted viewers. This isn’t an opinion: He’s an unapologetic practitioner of crafting “difficult” films, and a proud member of a slow-and-low legacy that extends from Antonioni to Akerman, from Tarkovsky to Tarr."

Movie review
From Time Out New York
One of the few roaring lions still producing genuine art-house cinema, Russian director Alexander Sokurov prefers the sort of deliberate pace that tests ADD-afflicted viewers. This isn’t an opinion: He’s an unapologetic practitioner of crafting “difficult” films, and a proud member of a slow-and-low legacy that extends from Antonioni to Akerman, from Tarkovsky to Tarr.
So to laud Sokurov’s latest film for being accessible is faint praise, as if the fact that you don’t need a Ph.D. in Russian history to watch it constitutes its worthiness. Alexandra’s story of an elderly woman (Vishnevskaya) who visits a remote military outpost may seem more straightforward than the director’s usual knotty, gnostic parables, but it’s neither simplistic nor a sellout. Even though Sokurov brings the characteristic symbolism—he might have titled this Mother Russia and Her Sons—the emotional aspects aren’t overshadowed by the intellectual ones. The balance makes all the difference.
As Alexandra tours the grounds where her grandson (Shevtsov) is stationed (the location is never specified, but it’s obviously Chechnya), the filmmaker paints a delicate portrait of soldiering: the banality of barrack life, the way machinery takes spatial precedence over human beings. The “enemy” is also given a face and a voice, but politics eventually plays second fiddle to the bond between the woman and her ward. That’s where the heart of Sokurov’s moving allegory beats loudest, paying off in a climactic sequence of hair-braiding that boils down nationalistic nurturing to a single tender, devastating gesture.
Author: David Fear 2008-03-25 16:28:34
Source:Time Out New York Issue 652: March 27–April 2, 2008
Alexander Nikolayevich Sokurov (Russian: Алекса́ндр Никола́евич Соку́ров) (b. June 14, 1951, Podorwikha, Irkutsk Oblast) is a Russian filmmaker from St Petersburg who has been hailed as successor to renowned director Andrei Tarkovsky.
Sokurov was born in Siberia into a military officer's family. He graduated from the History Department of the Nizhny Novgorod University in 1974 and entered one of the VGIK studios the following year. There he made friendship with Tarkovsky and was deeply influenced by his Mirror.
Most of Sokurov's early features were banned by Soviet authorities. During his early period, he produced numerous documentaries, including an interview with Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and a reportage about Grigori Kozintsev's flat in St Petersburg.
Mother and Son (1996) was his first internationally acclaimed feature film. It was mirrored by Father and Son (2003) which baffled the critics with its implicit homoeroticism (though Sokurov himself has criticized this particular interpretation. In the Wellspring DVD release, critic Armond White cited Sokurov's defense of the film against charges that it is "homoerotic". White explicated Sokurov's artistic and spiritual style, noting "To accept Sokurov's images without fear or limitation--to think love not smut--points lust in the direction of progress".[citation needed]. Sokurov has also filmed the first three installments of a planned tetralogy on prominent 20th-century rulers: Moloch (1999) about Hitler, Taurus (2000) about Lenin, and The Sun (2004) about Emperor Hirohito.
Sokurov is a Cannes Film Festival regular, four of his movies having debuted there one by one. Although he has been somewhat reluctant to cast accomplished actors in his features,[citation needed] the Russian Film Academy awarded several Nika Awards to him. His most commercially and critically successful effort to date has been a semi-documentary Russian Ark (2002), acclaimed primarily for its visually hypnotic images and single, unedited, shot.

Alexander SokurovOriginal

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Doe_pjh0XyY

ചവറുകള്‍: ചെമ്പക പൂവിന്നിഴ

2009-07-09T06:25:00.001+05:30

ചവറുകള്‍: ചെമ്പക പൂവിന്നിഴ

ചവറുകള്‍: Bits from our painting exhibition

2009-07-09T06:11:00.000+05:30

ചവറുകള്‍: Bits from our painting exhibition

Scientists create 'human sperm' from stem cells

2009-07-09T06:02:00.003+05:30

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PSHRAP9NgN0

Scientists Make Sperm From Stem Cells,

Scientists created human sperm from stem cells for the first time in a bid to better understand the causes of male infertility. The researchers, led by Karim Nayernia from England’s Newcastle University, developed a technique to turn stem cells with male chromosomes from human embryos into reproductive cells, known as germline, and prompt them to divide, they said in a study published in the journal Stem Cells and Development today. The divided cells produced functional sperm, the scientists said.

The new technique “will allow researchers to study in detail how sperm forms and lead to a better understanding of infertility in men,” Professor Nayernia said in a statement released with the study. “This understanding could help us develop new ways to help couples suffering infertility so they can have a child which is genetically their own.”

The research may also help scientists understand how genetic diseases are passed on, according to the statement.

The lab-created sperm won’t be used for “fertilization of human eggs and implantation of embryos,” the researchers said. “While we can understand that some people may have concerns, this does not mean that humans can be produced ‘in a dish’ and we have no intention of doing this,” they wrote.

Stem cells, which have the power to become any type of cell in the body, are controversial when research involves human embryos, which are killed when the cells are harvested.

The Mismeasure of Man

2009-07-04T08:18:00.005+05:30

The Mismeasure of Man is (1981) written by the Harvard paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould (1941-2002).

The book is a history and critique of the methods and motivations underlying biological determinism, the belief that "the social and economic differences between human groups—primarily races, classes, and sexes—arise from inherited, inborn distinctions and that society, in this sense, is an accurate reflection of biology."
The book also critiques the principal theme of biological determinism, that "worth can be assigned to individuals and groups by measuring intelligence as a single quantity." Gould discusses two prominent techniques used to measure such a quantity, craniometry and psychological testing. According to Gould these methods suffer from "two deep fallacies." The first fallacy is of reification, that is, "our tendency to convert abstract concepts into entities." These entities include IQ (the intelligence quotient) and g (the general intelligence factor), which have been the cornerstone of much intelligence research. The second fallacy is one of ranking, or our "propensity for ordering complex variation as a gradual ascending scale."
The Mismeasure of Man skeptically investigates "the abstraction of intelligence as a single entity, its location within the brain, its quantification as one number for each individual, and the use of these numbers to rank people in a single series of worthiness, invariably to find that oppressed and disadvantaged groups—races, classes, or sexes—are innately inferior and deserve their status."[2]
The book's second edition (1996) was revised to challenge the arguments of Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's The Bell Curve, which generated much controversy

Historical bias in biological sociology
The first parts of the book are devoted to a critical analysis of early works on the supposed biologically inherited basis for intelligence, such as craniometry, the measurement of skull volume and its relation to intellectual faculties. Gould argues that much of this research was based more on prejudice than scientific rigor, demonstrating how in several occasions researchers such as Samuel George Morton, Louis Agassiz, and Paul Broca committed the fallacy of using their expected conclusions as part of their reasoning. The book contains a complete re-working of Morton's original data of endocranial volume, and asserts that the original results were based on biases and manipulations, both by the selection of data and by Morton physically manipulating his results. While Gould never actually examined Morton's skull collection himself,[citation needed] subsequent investigations found Morton's original data to be more accurate than Gould describes. Gould claims, however, that when these purported biases are accounted for, the original hypothesis—an ordering in skull size ranging from Blacks through Mongols to Whites—is not supported in any way by the data. John S. Michael conducted the same experiments and corroborated much of Morton's data.[3] However, there were some discrepancies in Morton's calculations as well. As of now, there are no definitive answers. This issue remains to be resolved and is one of the most contested portions of the book.

Bias and falsification
The following chapters presented a historical evaluation of the concept of IQ and of the g factor, which were and are measures of intelligence used by psychologists. Gould argued that most race-related psychological studies have been heavily biased by the belief that human behavior was best explained by heredity. Gould noted that the often-cited twin studies by Cyril Burt on the genetic heritability of intelligence is often criticized for having used falsified data. According to L. S. Hearnshaw (1979), fraud had also been found in Burt's studies in kinship correlations in IQ, and declining levels of intelligence in Britain. Burt had also attempted to declare himself the father of "factor analysis", rather than his predecessor and mentor Charles Spearman (who invented the technique in 1904).
Statistical correlation and heritability
Gould devoted a large part of the book to an analysis of statistical correlation, which is used by psychologists to assert the validity of IQ tests and the heritability of intelligence. For example, to claim that an IQ test measures general intelligence factor, answers to various questions must correlate highly. The heritability of g requires that the scores of respondents who are closely related exhibit higher correlation than those of distant relations.
Gould pointed out that correlation was not the same as cause. As he put it, measures of the changes, over time, in "my age, the population of Mexico, the price of Swiss cheese, my pet turtle's weight, and the average distance between galaxies" have a high positive correlation, but that did not mean that Stephen Jay Gould's age goes up because the population of Mexico goes up. Second, and more specifically, a high positive correlation between parent and child IQ can be taken as either evidence that IQ is genetically inherited or that IQ is inherited through social and environmental factors. Since the same data can be used to argue either side of the case, the data in and of itself is not useful.
Furthermore, Gould argued that even if it were demonstrated that IQ were highly genetically heritable within a group, this does not explain the causes of IQ differences between groups or whether those differences can be changed by environment. Gould gave the example of height, which was known to be determined mostly through genes within socioeconomic groups, but group differences in height may be due to nutrition as well as genes. Richard Lewontin, a colleague of Gould's, is well-known for emphasizing this argument as it pertains to IQ testing.
According to Gould, a good example of the confusion of heritability is found in the statement "If all environments were to become equal for everyone, heritability would rise to 100% because all remaining differences in IQ would necessarily be genetic in origin."[4] He says that this claim is at best misleading and at worst, false. First, it is very hard to conceive of a world in which everyone grows up in exactly the same environment; the very fact that people are spatially and temporally dispersed means that no one can be in exactly the same environment, for example, a husband and wife may share a house, but they do not live in identical environments because each is married to a different person. Second, even if people grew up in exactly the same environment, not all differences would be genetic in origin. This is because embryonic development involves chance molecular events and random cellular movements that alter the effects of genes.
Gould argues that heritability is not a measure of phenotypic differences between groups, but rather differences between genotype and phenotype within a population. Even within a group, if all members of the group grow up in exactly the same environment, it does not mean that heritability is 100%. All Americans (or New Yorkers, or upper-class New Yorkers – one may define the population in question as narrowly as one likes) may eat exactly the same food, but their adult height will still be a result of both genetics and nutrition. In short, heritability is almost never 100%, and heritability tells us nothing about genetic differences between groups. This is true for height, which has a high degree of heritability; it is all the more true for intelligence. This is true for reasons other than those involving heritability, as Gould discusses.
Gould also rejects the concept which IQ is meant to measure, "general intelligence" (or g). IQ tests, he points out, ask many different kinds of questions. Responses to different kinds of questions tend to form clusters. In other words, different kinds of questions can be given different scores – which suggests that an IQ test is really a combination of a number of different tests that test a number of different things. Gould claims that proponents of IQ tests assume that there is such a thing as general intelligence, and analyze the data so as to produce one number, which they then claim is a measure of general intelligence.
Gould argues that this one number (and therefore, the implication that there is a real thing called "general intelligence" that this number measures) is in fact an artifact of the statistical operations psychologists apply to the raw data. He argues that one can analyze the same data more effectively and end up with a number of different scores (that are as or more valid, meaning they measure something) rather than one score.
Finally, Gould points out that he is not opposed to the notion of "biological variability," which is the premise that heredity influences intelligence. Instead, he does criticize the notion of "biological determinism," which is the idea that genes determine destiny and there is nothing we can or should do about this.

[edit] Reception

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: The Mismeasure of Man
The Mismeasure of Man won several awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award for non-fiction in 1981 and the Outstanding Book Award from the American Educational Research Association in 1983. An Italian translation won the Iglesias Prize in 1991.
Of the twenty-four reviews of the original edition written by academics experts in psychology, fourteen were positive, three were mixed, and seven were negative. Gould pointed out that "nearly all" of the negative reviews were by "hereditarian" mental testers.[5]

[edit] Praise
Gould stated that one of the most positive reviews of the original edition had come from the British Journal of Mathematical & Statistical Psychology, which Cyril Burt had once been an editor of. It stated that, "Gould has performed a valuable service in exposing the logical basis of one of the most important debates in the social sciences, and this book should be required reading for students and practitioners alike."[5]
Leon J. Kamin, an American psychologist at Princeton University, writes that Gould's work "effectively anticipated and thoroughly undermined" the arguments later presented in The Bell Curve. He praises the additions to the book's 1996 edition, writing that they "strengthen the claim of this book to be 'a major contribution toward deflating pseudobiological "explanations" of our present social woes.'"
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt stresses Gould's critique of factor analysis, saying the book "demonstrates persuasively how factor analysis led to the cardinal error in reasoning of confusing correlation with cause, or, to put it another way, of attributing false concreteness to the abstract."
The Saturday Review, a British journal, praises the book as a "fascinating historical study of scientific racism" that "illustrate[s] both the logical inconsistencies of the theories and the prejudicially motivated, albeit unintentional, misuse of data in each case."
A review in the Sunday Times, another British publication, speaks favorably of the book, suggesting Gould "shifts the argument from a sterile contest between environmentalists and hereditarians and turns it into an argument between those who are impressed with what our biology stops us doing and those who are impressed with what it allows us to do."
Richard York and Brett Clark of the US Monthly Review praise Gould's narrow focus: "Rather than attempt a grand critique of all 'scientific' efforts aimed at justifying social inequalities, Gould performs a well-reasoned assessment of the errors underlying a specific set of theories and empirical claims."[6]
In December 2006 Discover magazine ranked the The Mismeasure of Man as the 17th greatest science book of all time.[7] In 1998, the Modern Library ranked it as the 24th best non-fiction book of all time.[8]

[edit] Criticisms
The Mismeasure of Man has been considered highly controversial among psychologists who support the concepts Gould examined.
Bernard Davis (1916–1994), professor of microbiology at the Harvard Medical School, accused Gould of setting up straw man arguments, as well as incorrectly defining key terms (notably "reification"), choosing data in a "highly selective" manner, and in general being motivated more by political concerns rather than scientific ones.[9] Davis claimed that a laudatory review by Philip Morrison, which appeared in Scientific American, was written because the journal's editorial staff had "long seen the study of the genetics of intelligence as a threat to social justice."[10]
Statistician David J. Bartholomew, of the London School of Economics, wrote that Gould erred in his use of factor analysis [11] and irrelevantly focused on issue of reification and ignored scientific consensus on the existence of the g factor of intelligence.[12]
Steve Blinkhorn, a senior lecturer in psychology at Hatfield Polytechnic, accused Gould of selectively juxtaposing data in order to further a political agenda.[13]
Psychologist Franz Samelson wrote a review in Science, which tended to be critical on a number of counts.[14] Samelson, for example, was critical of Gould's argument that U.S. Army intelligence tests contributed to the Immigration Restriction Act of 1924.

[edit] Response by persons mentioned in the book
Arthur Jensen, an educational psychologist at UC Berkeley, was heavily criticized in The Mismeasure of Man. Jensen accused Gould of using straw man arguments, misrepresenting other scientists, and operating from a political agenda.[15]
Psychologist Hans Eysenck (1916-1997), critiqued The Mismeasure of Man for using a "non-causal" relationship to defend a conclusion that black children have lower innate IQ.[16] Eysenck and Gould debated the book in an exchange of letters to The New York Review of Books.[17][18] Eysenck's review called the book "a paleontologist's distorted view of what psychologists think, untutored in even the most elementary facts of the science." Gould criticised Eysenck's correlation of IQ with EEG evoked potentials by citing Arthur Jensen's own work in Bias in Mental Testing (1980). Jensen could only find "correlations larger than about -0.4 to -0.5" between reaction time and IQ, with typical correlations ranging between -0.3 and -0.4. Jensen wrote: "The AEP average evoked potential and IQ research picture soon becomes a thicket of seemingly inconsistent and confusing findings, confounded variables, methodological differences, statistically questionable conclusions, unbridled theoretical speculation, and, not surprisingly, considerable controversy.

MICHAEL JACKSON -MJ-KING OF POP- 'S NO MORE

2009-06-28T05:41:00.014+05:30

( THE IMAGES OF THE KING AND LISA MARIE )

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mqQ-t7ibOyw

The seventh child of the Jackson family , MJJ made his debut onto the professional music scene at the age of 11 as a member of The Jackson 5 in 1969. He then began a solo career in 1971 while still a member of the group. Referred to as the "King of Pop"in subsequent years, his 1982 album Thriller remains the world's best-selling album of all time and four of his other solo studio albums are among the world's best-selling records: Off the Wall (1979), Bad (1987), Dangerous (1991) and HIStory (1995).
In the early 1980s, he became a dominant figure in popular music and the first African American entertainer to amass a strong crossover following on MTV. The popularity of his music videos airing on MTV, such as "Beat It", "Billie Jean" and "Thriller"—widely credited with transforming the music video from a promotional tool into an art form—helped bring the relatively new channel to fame. Videos such as "Black or White" and "Scream" made Jackson an enduring staple on MTV in the 1990s. With stage performances and music videos, Jackson popularized a number of physically complicated dance techniques, such as the robot and the moonwalk. His distinctive musical sound and vocal style influenced many hip hop, pop and contemporary R&B artists across several generations.
Jackson donated and raised millions of dollars for beneficial causes through his foundations, charity singles, and support of 39 charities. Other aspects of his personal life, including his often changing appearances and eccentric behavior, generated significant controversy which damaged his public image. Though he was accused of child sexual abuse in 1993, the criminal investigation was closed due to lack of evidence and Jackson was not charged. The singer had experienced health concerns since the early 1990s and conflicting reports regarding the state of his finances since the late 1990s. Jackson married twice and fathered three children, all of which caused further controversy. In 2005, Jackson was tried and acquitted of further sexual abuse allegations and several other charges.
One of the few artists to have been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice, his other achievements include multiple Guinness World Records—including one for "Most Successful Entertainer of All Time"—13 Grammy Awards, 13 number one singles in his solo career, and the sale of 750 million albums worldwide.[4] At the time of his death, he was preparing for This Is It, a series of 50 concerts that would have been held in London beginning July 13th.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rixrD2Ljgzk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z-TZnNXXQrI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CH-BMjbNie4

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TUxk2adMtWs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfnkq4pQ2vE

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f8muMo0fw_M

Who is Robert Lanza?

2009-06-22T07:57:00.004+05:30

Robert Lanza, M. D. is considered one of the leading scientists in the world. He is currently Chief Scientific Officer at Advanced Cell Technology, and Adjunct Professor at Wake Forest University School of Medicine. He has hundreds of publications and inventions, and over 20 scientific books: among them, “Principles of Tissue Engineering,” which is recognized as the definitive reference in the field. Others include One World: The Health & Survival of the Human Species in the 21st Century (Foreword by former President and Nobel laureate Jimmy Carter), and the “Handbook of Stem Cells” and “Essentials of Stem Cell Biology,” which are considered the definitive references in stem cell research.
Dr. Lanza received his BA and MD degrees from the University of Pennsylvania, where he was both a University Scholar and Benjamin Franklin Scholar. He was also a Fulbright Scholar, and was part of the team that cloned the world’s first human embryo for the purpose of generating embryonic stem cells. In 2001 he was also the first to clone an endangered species (a Gaur), and in 2003, he cloned an endangered wild ox (a Banteng) from the frozen skin cells of an animal that had died at the San Diego Zoo nearly a quarter-of-a-century earlier. Lanza and his colleagues were also the first to demonstrate that nuclear transplantation could be used to reverse the aging process and to generate immune-compatible tissues, including the first organ tissue-engineered from cloned cells.
One of his most recent successes was showing that it is feasible to generate functional oxygen-carrying red blood cells from human embryonic stem (hES) cells. The blood cells were comparable to normal transfusable blood and could serve as a potentially inexhaustible source of “universal” blood. Dr. Lanza has also succeeded in getting stem cells to grow into retinal cells. Using this technology some forms of blindness may be curable. His team also discovered how to generate functional hemangioblasts – a population of “ambulance” cells- from hES cells. In animals, these cells quickly repaired vascular damage, cutting the death rate after a heart attack in half and restoring the blood flow to ischemic limbs that might otherwise have to be amputated. Recently, Lanza and a team lead by Kwang-Soo Kim at Harvard University reported a safe method for generating induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells. Human iPS cells were created from skin cells by direct delivery of proteins, thus eliminating the harmful risks associated with genetic manipulation. This new method provides a potentially safe source of patient-specific stem cells for translation into the clinic. However, one of his greatest early achievements came from his demonstration that techniques used in preimplantation genetic diagnosis could be used to generate hES cells without embryonic destruction.Dr. Lanza has received numerous awards, including a Rave Award for medicine, and an “All Star” award for biotechnology. Lanza has been called the “Bill Gates of Science. He believes that stem cell technology will have a substantial importance in the future of medicine. According to Discover magazine, “Lanza’s single-minded quest to usher in this new age has paid dividends in scientific insights and groundbreaking discoveries.” Dr. Lanza and his research have been featured in almost every media outlet in the world, including CNN, TIME, Newsweek, People, as well as the front pages of the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, among others. Lanza has worked with some of the greatest thinkers of our time, including Nobel laureates Gerald Edelman and Rodney Porter, renowned Harvard psychologist B.F. Skinner (the “Father of modern behaviorism”), Jonas Salk (discoverer of the Polio vaccine), and heart transplant pioneer Christiaan Barnard. His current research and work at Advanced Cell Technology focuses on stem cells and regenerative medicine and their potential to provide therapies for some of the world’s most deadly and debilitating conditions.In 2007, Lanza published a feature article, “A New Theory of the Universe” in The American Scholar, a leading intellectual journal which has previously published works by Albert Einstein, Margaret Mead, and Carl Sagan, among others. His theory places biology above the other sciences in an attempt to solve one of nature’s biggest puzzles, the theory of everything that other disciplines have been pursuing for the last century. Nobel laureate E. Donnall Thomas stated “Any short statement does not do justice to such a scholarly work. The work is a scholarly consideration of science and philosophy that brings biology into the central role in unifying the whole.” This new view has become known as Biocentrism. In biocentrism, space and time are forms of animal sense perception, rather than external physical objects. Understanding this more fully yields answers to several major puzzles of mainstream science, and offers a new way of understanding everything from the microworld (for instance, the reason for Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle and the double-slit experiment) to the forces, constants, and laws that shape the universe.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtATAMweoI0

Visuals outside the Medical ICU, THIRUVANATHAPURAM

2009-06-20T05:15:00.003+05:30

Jhumpa Lahiri - the achiever

2009-06-16T17:03:00.005+05:30

Lahiri was born in London, the daughter of Bengali Indian immigrants. Her family moved to the United States when she was three; Lahiri considers herself an American. Lahiri grew up in Kingston, Rhode Island, where her father worked as a librarian at the University of Rhode Island the protagonist of Lahiri's story "The Third and Final Continent" is based on her father.
When she began kindergarten Lahiri's teacher decided to call her by her pet name, Jhumpa, because it was easier to pronounce than her "good names"Lahiri recalled, "I always felt so embarrassed by my name... You feel like you're causing someone pain just by being who you are."[7] Lahiri's ambivalence over her identity was the inspiration for the ambivalence of Gogol, the protagonist of her novel The Namesake, over his unusual name.[4] Lahiri graduated from South Kingston High School, and received her B.A. in English literature from Barnard College in 1989.
Lahiri then received multiple degrees from Boston University: an M.A. in English, an M.A. in Creative Writing, an M.A. in Comparative Literature and a Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies. She took up a fellowship at Provincetown's Fine Arts Work Center, which lasted for the next two years (1997–1998). Lahiri taught creative writing at Boston University and the Rhode Island School of Design.
In 2001, Lahiri married Alberto Vourvoulias-Bush, a journalist who was then Deputy Editor of TIME Latin America (and is now Executive Editor of El Diario/La Prenda, New York's largest Spanish daily and America's fastest growing newspaper). Lahiri lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband and their two children, Octavio (b. 2002) and Noor (b. 2005)

Literary career
During her six years at Boston University, Lahiri worked on short stories,nine of which were collected in her debut book, Interpreter of Maladies (1999). The stories address sensitive dilemmas in the lives of Indians or Indian immigrants, with themes such as marital difficulties, miscarriages, and the disconnection between first and second generation United States immigrants. Lahiri later wrote, "When I first started writing I was not conscious that my subject was the Indian-American experience. What drew me to my craft was the desire to force the two worlds I occupied to mingle on the page as I was not brave enough, or mature enough, to allow in life."[3] The collection was praised by American critics, but received mixed reviews in India, where reviewers were alternately enthusiastic and upset Lahiri had "not paint[ed] Indians in a more positive light."[9] Interpreter of Maladies won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (only the seventh time a story collection had won the award), and sold 600,000 copies.[4][10]
In 2003, Lahiri published The Namesake, her highly-anticipated first novel.[9] The book spans more than thirty years in the life of a fictional family, the Gangulis. The Calcutta-born parents immigrated to the United States as young adults, and their children, Gogol and Sonia, grow up in the United States experiencing the constant generational and cultural gap between their parents and them. A film adaptation of The Namesake was released in March 2007, directed by Mira Nair and starring Kal Penn as Gogol and Bollywood stars Tabu and Irrfan Khan as his parents.
Lahiri's second collection of short stories, Unaccustomed Earth, was released on April 1, 2008. Upon its publication, Unaccustomed Earth achieved the rare distinction of debuting on The New York Times best seller list in the number 1 slot.[11] New York Times Book Review editor Dwight Garner stated, "It’s hard to remember the last genuinely serious, well-written work of fiction — particularly a book of stories — that leapt straight to No. 1; it’s a powerful demonstration of Lahiri’s newfound commercial clout."[11]
Since 2005, Lahiri has been a Vice President of the PEN American Center, an organization designed to promote friendship and intellectual cooperation among writers.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4IAhZhMi3U
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UCORnF2Y74w

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ec3-nfllSxg

Czech nurses can get free implants as bonus

2009-06-16T05:07:00.003+05:30

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6R4gHcuK2pk
When Czechoslovakian nurse Petra Kalivdova, 31, was considering renewing her three-year contract at a private health clinic in Prague, her employer sweetened the deal with ample vacation time, free German language lessons -- and free plastic surgery.Kalivdova, who chose breast implants and liposuction after re-upping, thinks it was well worth it. "I feel better when I look in the mirror," she said in an article published in the Sunday New York Times.
She went on to suggest that a surgically enhanced bod is tied to increased patient well-being:
"We were always taught that if a nurse is nice, intelligent, loves her work and looks attractive, then patients will recover faster."
While I go in for the old you-can't-truly-care-for-others-till-you-care-for-yourself philosophy to a point, this seems a bit far-fetched, no?
Well, maybe not when you put it into context. As the Times piece points out, the Czech Republic is not long out of the shadow of its Communist past. As such, beauty pageants and glamor exert a strong, gaudy cultural pull that might seem weird to our jaded American sensibilities. In fact, Kalivdova reports that a male recruiter asked her to do a little catwalk strut in a recent (nursing!) job interview. Smaller Czechoslovakian cities outside of Prague -- also hurting for nurses -- by and large offer enticements like free meals and childcare, although some also discount cosmetic procedures.
Not surprisingly, using plastic surgery as an incentive has pushed some buttons. Sociologist Jirina Siklova, founder of Prague's Gender Studies Center, huffed, “I would expect such behavior from an erotic salon — not from an institution devoted to health care.”
Despite such criticism, the freebie procedures seem to be helping nurse recruitment at Kalivdova's workplace, where a male doctor is also considering taking his bonus in the form of lipo.
Unless you've been living under a rock, you've probably heard about the nursing shortage here at home, which is just part of a global paucity of qualified nurses. They need and deserve all the bonuses, incentives and compensation they can get, but this just seems a little too sexist, demeaning, and frankly creepy to fly in the States. Not because nurses are being offered these procedures if they really want them, but for the rationale that seems to be behind it in the Czech Republic.

Zizek: Revolutionary Struggle and Beginning Again

2009-06-15T08:18:00.003+05:30

HOW TO BEGIN FROM THE BEGINNING
by Slavoj Zizek
In his wonderful short text ‘Notes of a Publicist’—written in February 1922 when the Bolsheviks, after winning the Civil War against all odds, had to retreat into the New Economic Policy of allowing a much wider scope to the market economy and private property—Lenin uses the analogy of a climber who must backtrack from his first attempt to reach a new mountain peak to describe what retreat means in a revolutionary process, and how it can be done without opportunistically betraying the cause:
Let us picture to ourselves a man ascending a very high, steep and hitherto unexplored mountain. Let us assume that he has overcome unprecedented difficulties and dangers and has succeeded in reaching a much higher point than any of his predecessors, but still has not reached the summit. He finds himself in a position where it is not only difficult and dangerous to proceed in the direction and along the path he has chosen, but positively impossible.1
In these circumstances, Lenin writes:
He is forced to turn back, descend, seek another path, longer, perhaps, but one that will enable him to reach the summit. The descent from the height that no one before him has reached proves, perhaps, to be more dangerous and difficult for our imaginary traveller than the ascent—it is easier to slip; it is not so easy to choose a foothold; there is not that exhilaration that one feels in going upwards, straight to the goal, etc. One has to tie a rope round oneself, spend hours with an alpenstock to cut footholds or a projection to which the rope could be tied firmly; one has to move at a snail’s pace, and move downwards, descend, away from the goal; and one does not know where this extremely dangerous and painful descent will end, or whether there is a fairly safe detour by which one can ascend more boldly, more quickly and more directly to the summit.
It would only be natural for a climber who found himself in such a position to have ‘moments of despondency’. In all probability these moments would be more numerous and harder to bear if he could hear the voices of those below, who ‘through a telescope and from a safe distance, are watching his dangerous descent’: ‘The voices from below ring with malicious joy. They do not conceal it; they chuckle gleefully and shout: “He’ll fall in a minute! Serve him right, the lunatic!”.’ Others try to conceal their malicious glee, behaving ‘more like Judas Golovlyov’, the notoriously hypocritical landowner in Saltykov-Shchedrin’s novel, The Golovlyov Family:
They moan and raise their eyes to heaven in sorrow, as if to say: ‘It grieves us sorely to see our fears justified! But did not we, who have spent all our lives working out a judicious plan for scaling this mountain, demand that the ascent be postponed until our plan was complete? And if we so vehemently protested against taking this path, which this lunatic is now abandoning (look, look, he has turned back! He is descending! A single step is taking him hours of preparation! And yet we were roundly abused when time and again we demanded moderation and caution!), if we so fervently censured this lunatic and warned everybody against imitating and helping him, we did so entirely because of our devotion to the great plan to scale this mountain, and in order to prevent this great plan from being generally discredited!’
Happily, Lenin continues, our imaginary traveller cannot hear the voices of these people who are ‘true friends’ of the idea of ascent; if he did, ‘they would probably nauseate him’—‘And nausea, it is said, does not help one to keep a clear head and a firm step, particularly at high altitudes.’
Of course, a metaphor does not amount to proof: ‘every analogy is lame’. Lenin goes on to spell out the actual situation confronting the infant Soviet republic:
Russia’s proletariat rose to a gigantic height in its revolution, not only when it is compared with 1789 and 1793, but also when compared with 1871. We must take stock of what we have done and what we have not as dispassionately, as clearly and as concretely as possible. If we do that we shall be able to keep clear heads. We shall not suffer from nausea, illusions, or despondency.
After enumerating the achievements of the Soviet state by 1922, Lenin explains what has not been done:
But we have not finished building even the foundations of socialist economy, and the hostile powers of moribund capitalism can still deprive us of that. We must clearly appreciate this and frankly admit it; for there is nothing more dangerous than illusions (and vertigo, particularly at high altitudes). And there is absolutely nothing terrible, nothing that should give legitimate grounds for the slightest despondency, in admitting this bitter truth; for we have always urged and reiterated the elementary truth of Marxism—that the joint efforts of the workers of several advanced countries are needed for the victory of socialism. We are still alone and in a backward country, a country that was ruined more than others, but we have accomplished a great deal.
More than that, Lenin notes, ‘we have preserved intact the army of the revolutionary proletarian forces; we have preserved its manoeuvring ability; we have kept clear heads and can soberly calculate where, when and how far to retreat (in order to leap further forward); where, when and how to set to work to alter what has remained unfinished.’ And he concludes:
Those Communists are doomed who imagine that it is possible to finish such an epoch-making undertaking as completing the foundations of socialist economy (particularly in a small-peasant country) without making mistakes, without retreats, without numerous alterations to what is unfinished or wrongly done. Communists who have no illusions, who do not give way to despondency, and who preserve their strength and flexibility ‘to begin from the beginning’ over and over again in approaching an extremely difficult task, are not doomed (and in all probability will not perish).
Fail better
This is Lenin at his Beckettian best, foreshadowing the line from Worstward Ho: ‘Try again. Fail again. Fail better.’2 His conclusion—to begin from the beginning—makes it clear that he is not talking about merely slowing down and fortifying what has already been achieved, but about descending back to the starting point: one should begin from the beginning, not from the place that one succeeded in reaching in the previous effort. In Kierkegaard’s terms, a revolutionary process is not a gradual progress but a repetitive movement, a movement of repeating the beginning, again and again.
Georg Lukács ended his pre-Marxist masterwork Theory of the Novel with the famous sentence: ‘The voyage is over, the travel begins.’ This is what happens at the moment of defeat: the voyage of a particular revolutionary experience is over, but the true travel, the work of beginning again, is just starting. This willingness to retreat, however, in no way implies a non-dogmatic opening towards others, an admission to political competitors, ‘We were wrong, you were right in your warnings, so let us now join forces’. On the contrary, Lenin insists that such moments are the times when utmost discipline is needed. Addressing the Bolsheviks’ Eleventh Party Congress a few months later, in April 1922, he argued:
When a whole army (I speak in the figurative sense) is in retreat, it cannot have the same morale as when it is advancing. At every step you find a certain mood of depression . . . That is where the serious danger lies; it is terribly difficult to retreat after a great victorious advance, for the relations are entirely different. During a victorious advance, even if discipline is relaxed, everybody presses forward on his own accord. During a retreat, however, discipline must be more conscious and is a hundred times more necessary, because, when the entire army is in retreat, it does not know or see where it should halt. It sees only retreat; under such circumstances a few panic-stricken voices are, at times, enough to cause a stampede. The danger here is enormous. When a real army is in retreat, machine-guns are kept ready, and when an orderly retreat degenerates into a disorderly one, the command to fire is given, and quite rightly, too.
The consequences of this stance were very clear for Lenin. In answer to ‘the sermons’ on the NEP preached by Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries—‘The revolution has gone too far. What you are saying now we have been saying all the time, permit us to say it again’—he told the Eleventh Party Congress:
We say in reply: ‘Permit us to put you before a firing squad for saying that. Either you refrain from expressing your views, or, if you insist on expressing your political views publicly in the present circumstances, when our position is far more difficult than it was when the white guards were directly attacking us, then you will have only yourselves to blame if we treat you as the worst and most pernicious white-guard elements.’3
This ‘red terror’ should nonetheless be distinguished from Stalinist ‘totalitarianism’. In his memoirs, Sándor Márai provided a precise definition of the difference. Even in the most violent phases of the Leninist dictatorship, when those who opposed the revolution were brutally deprived of their right to (public free) speech, they were not deprived of their right to silence: they were allowed to withdraw into inner exile. An episode from the autumn of 1922 when, on Lenin’s instigation, the Bolsheviks were organizing the infamous ‘Philosophers’ Steamer’, is indicative here. When he learned that an old Menshevik historian on the list of those intellectuals to be expelled had withdrawn into private life to await death due to heavy illness, Lenin not only took him off the list, but ordered that he be given additional food coupons. Once the enemy resigned from political struggle, Lenin’s animosity stopped.
For Stalinism, however, even such silence resonated too much. Not only were masses of people required to show their support by attending big public rallies, artists and scientists also had to compromise themselves by participating in active measures such as signing official proclamations, or paying lip-service to Stalin and the official Marxism. If, in the Leninist dictatorship, one could be shot for what one said, in Stalinism one could be shot for what one did not say. This was followed through to the very end: suicide itself, the ultimate desperate withdrawal into silence, was condemned by Stalin as the last and highest act of treason against the Party. This distinction between Leninism and Stalinism reflects their general attitude towards society: for the former, society is a field of merciless struggle for power, a struggle which is openly admitted; for the latter, the conflict is, sometimes almost imperceptibly, redefined as that of a healthy society against what is excluded from it—vermin, insects, traitors who are less than human……
A different path
So where are we today, after the désastre obscur of 1989? As in 1922, the voices from below ring with malicious joy all around us: ‘Serves you right, lunatics who wanted to enforce their totalitarian vision on society!’ Others try to conceal their malicious glee; they moan and raise their eyes to heaven in sorrow, as if to say: ‘It grieves us sorely to see our fears justified! How noble was your vision to create a just society! Our heart was beating with you, but reason told us that your plans would finish only in misery and new unfreedoms!’ While rejecting any compromise with these seductive voices, we definitely have to begin from the beginning—not to build further upon the foundations of the revolutionary epoch of the 20th century, which lasted from 1917 to 1989, or, more precisely, 1968—but to descend to the starting point and choose a different path.
But how? The defining problem of Western Marxism has been the lack of a revolutionary subject: how is it that the working class does not complete the passage from in-itself to for-itself and constitute itself as a revolutionary agent? This question provided the main raison d’être for Western Marxism’s reference to psychoanalysis, which was evoked to explain the unconscious libidinal mechanisms preventing the rise of class consciousness that are inscribed into the very being or social situation of the working class. In this way, the truth of the Marxist socio-economic analysis was saved: there was no reason to give ground to revisionist theories about the rise of the middle classes. For this same reason, Western Marxism has also engaged in a constant search for others who could play the role of the revolutionary agent, as the understudy replacing the indisposed working class: Third World peasants, students and intellectuals, the excluded. It is just possible that this desperate search for the revolutionary agent is the form of appearance of its very opposite: the fear of finding it, of seeing it where it already stirs. Waiting for another to do the job for us is a way of rationalizing our inactivity.
It is against this background that Alain Badiou has suggested we should reassert the communist hypothesis. He writes:
If we have to abandon this hypothesis, then it is no longer worth doing anything at all in the field of collective action. Without the horizon of communism, without this Idea, nothing in historical and political becoming is of any interest to a philosopher.
However, Badiou continues:
to hold on to the Idea, the existence of the hypothesis, does not mean that its first form of presentation, focused on property and the state, must be maintained just as it is. In fact, what we are ascribed as a philosophical task, even a duty, is to help a new modality of existence of the hypothesis to come into being.12
One should be careful not to read these lines in a Kantian way, conceiving of communism as a regulative Idea, and thereby resuscitating the spectre of ‘ethical socialism’, with equality as its a priori norm or axiom. Rather, one should maintain the precise reference to a set of social antagonisms which generates the need for communism; the good old Marxian notion of communism not as an ideal, but as a movement which reacts to actual contradictions. To treat communism as an eternal Idea implies that the situation which generates it is no less eternal, that the antagonism to which communism reacts will always be here. From which it is only one step to a deconstructive reading of communism as a dream of presence, of abolishing all alienating representation; a dream which thrives on its own impossibility.
Though it is easy to make fun of Fukuyama’s notion of the End of History, the majority today is Fukuyamaist. Liberal-democratic capitalism is accepted as the finally found formula of the best possible society; all one can do is to render it more just, tolerant and so on. The simple but pertinent question arises here: if liberal-democratic capitalism is, if not the best, then the least bad form of society, why should we not simply resign ourselves to it in a mature way, even accept it wholeheartedly? Why insist on the communist hypothesis, against all odds?
Class and commons
It is not enough to remain faithful to the communist hypothesis: one has to locate antagonisms within historical reality which make it a practical urgency. The only true question today is: does global capitalism contain antagonisms strong enough to prevent its indefinite reproduction? Four possible antagonisms present themselves: the looming threat of ecological catastrophe; the inappropriateness of private property for so-called intellectual property; the socio-ethical implications of new techno-scientific developments, especially in biogenetics; and last, but not least, new forms of social apartheid—new walls and slums. We should note that there is a qualitative difference between the last feature, the gap that separates the excluded from the included, and the other three, which designate the domains of what Hardt and Negri call ‘commons’—the shared substance of our social being, whose privatization is a violent act which should be resisted by force, if necessary.
First, there are the commons of culture, the immediately socialized forms of cognitive capital: primarily language, our means of communication and education, but also shared infrastructure such as public transport, electricity, post, etc. If Bill Gates were allowed a monopoly, we would have reached the absurd situation in which a private individual would have owned the software tissue of our basic network of communication. Second, there are the commons of external nature, threatened by pollution and exploitation—from oil to forests and the natural habitat itself—and, third, the commons of internal nature, the biogenetic inheritance of humanity. What all of these struggles share is an awareness of the destructive potential—up to the self-annihilation of humanity itself—in allowing the capitalist logic of enclosing these commons a free run. It is this reference to ‘commons’ which allows the resuscitation of the notion of communism: it enables us to see their progressive enclosure as a process of proletarianization of those who are thereby excluded from their own substance; a process that also points towards exploitation. The task today is to renew the political economy of exploitation—for instance, that of anonymous ‘knowledge workers’ by their companies.
It is, however, only the fourth antagonism, the reference to the excluded, that justifies the term communism. There is nothing more private than a state community which perceives the excluded as a threat and worries how to keep them at a proper distance. In other words, in the series of the four antagonisms, the one between the included and the excluded is the crucial one: without it, all the others lose their subversive edge. Ecology turns into a problem of sustainable development, intellectual property into a complex legal challenge, biogenetics into an ethical issue. One can sincerely fight for the environment, defend a broader notion of intellectual property, oppose the copyrighting of genes, without confronting the antagonism between the included and the excluded. Even more, one can formulate some of these struggles in terms of the included threatened by the polluting excluded. In this way, we get no true universality, only ‘private’ concerns in the Kantian sense. Corporations such as Whole Foods and Starbucks continue to enjoy favour among liberals even though they both engage in anti-union activities; the trick is that they sell products with a progressive spin: coffee made with beans bought at ‘fair-trade’ prices, expensive hybrid vehicles, etc. In short, without the antagonism between the included and the excluded, we may find ourselves in a world in which Bill Gates is the greatest humanitarian, fighting poverty and disease, and Rupert Murdoch the greatest environmentalist, mobilizing hundreds of millions through his media empire.
What one should add here, moving beyond Kant, is that there are social groups which, on account of their lack of a determinate place in the ‘private’ order of social hierarchy, stand directly for universality: they are what Jacques Rancière calls the ‘part of no part’ of the social body. All truly emancipatory politics is generated by the short-circuit between the universality of the public use of reason and the universality of the ‘part of no part’. This was already the communist dream of the young Marx—to bring together the universality of philosophy with the universality of the proletariat. From Ancient Greece, we have a name for the intrusion of the excluded into the socio-political space: democracy.
The predominant liberal notion of democracy also deals with those excluded, but in a radically different mode: it focuses on their inclusion, as minority voices. All positions should be heard, all interests taken into account, the human rights of everyone guaranteed, all ways of life, cultures and practices respected, and so on. The obsession of this democracy is the protection of all kinds of minorities: cultural, religious, sexual, etc. The formula of democracy here consists of patient negotiation and compromise. What gets lost in this is the position of universality embodied in the excluded. The new emancipatory politics will no longer be the act of a particular social agent, but an explosive combination of different agents. What unites us is that, in contrast to the classic image of proletarians who have ‘nothing to lose but their chains’, we are in danger of losing everything. The threat is that we will be reduced to an abstract, empty Cartesian subject dispossessed of all our symbolic content, with our genetic base manipulated, vegetating in an unliveable environment. This triple threat makes us all proletarians, reduced to ‘substanceless subjectivity’, as Marx put it in the Grundrisse. The figure of the ‘part of no part’ confronts us with the truth of our own position; and the ethico-political challenge is to recognize ourselves in this figure. In a way, we are all excluded, from nature as well as from our symbolic substance. Today, we are all potentially homo sacer, and the only way to avoid actually becoming so is to act preventively.
1 V. I. Lenin, ‘Notes of a Publicist’, published posthumously in Pravda, 16 April 1924; Collected Works, vol. 33, Moscow 1966, pp. 204–7.
2 Samuel Beckett, ‘Worstward Ho’, Nohow On, London 1992, p. 101.
3 Lenin, ‘Eleventh Congress of the rcp(b)’, Collected Works, vol. 33, pp. 281–3.
4 Sándor Márai, Memoir of Hungary: 1944–1948, Budapest 1996.
5 Moshe Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle [1968], Ann Arbor, mi 2005. pp. 131–2.
6 Quoted in Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, Appendix 1, pp. 146–7.
7 Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, p. 84.
8 Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, p. 133.
9 Lenin, ‘Better Fewer, But Better’, Collected Works, vol. 33, p. 495.
10 Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, p. 125.
11 Lewin, Lenin’s Last Struggle, p. 124.
12 Alain Badiou, The Meaning of Sarkozy, London and New York 2008, p

Conversations With History

2009-06-12T12:28:00.002+05:30

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FFDcGnupj8E

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfAGnxKfwOg

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3muzELM1_uw

Umberto Eco

2009-06-11T15:31:00.003+05:30

http://www.umbertoeco.com/en/

The Name of the Rose 1986 Sean Connery Christian Slater

2009-06-11T07:43:00.008+05:30

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qS0Z932WVgc

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dna80L5V7HU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_noPUQT3Ho

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WpO5WBpUVQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GYbp0bnvRMY

Islam, sexuality, and the politics of belonging in the Netherlands

2009-06-09T17:46:00.001+05:30

International Viewpoint
News and analysis from the Fourth International
http://www.internationalviewpoint.org
Theory
Against Tolerance
Islam, sexuality, and the politics of belonging in the Netherlands
Paul Mepschen
Sex seems to play a key role in the Dutch politics of belonging. Sex – especially homosexuality – is instrumentalized by the nationalist right who uses it to represent immigrants as ‘strangers’ who threaten tolerant, modern, Dutch society. Tolerance, power, and xenophobia come to be increasingly entwined in the Netherlands. A plea against ‘tolerance’ as the foundation for political and social struggle.
The Slovenian philosopher and sociologist Slavoj Zizek argues that tolerance constitutes a mystifying discourse veiling what is really at the heart of political and social struggle. There is good reason, Zizek argues, that someone like Martin Luther King didn’t make use of the concept. The struggle against racism is not a struggle for tolerance, but for social, economic, political, and cultural rights, and for changing unjust and undemocratic power relations. Zizek makes a parallel with feminism, asking if feminists struggle to be ‘tolerated’ by men. Of course not – from this perspective the concept of tolerance even becomes rather ridiculous.
Tolerance, in other words, does not work as an imperative for political struggle. As the American left political philosopher Wendy Brown argues, tolerance is a discourse of power which possesses a certain “magnanimity”and plays a key role in dynamics of in- and exclusion in liberal societies. Moreover, holding on to tolerance as the foundation for one’s engagement in struggle is what may keep the lgbt-movement from reinventing itself in an era in which globalization, the global spread of neoliberal capitalism, and the rise of Islamophobia, are radically changing what is demanded of our movements; how our struggles relate to other struggles; to the state; and to dominant liberal discourses. While the situation in the Netherlands provides perhaps the most cardinal example of the entanglement of lgbt-politics with racism and Islamophobia, the challenges we face in the Netherlands because of this strange co-optation of homosexuality by nationalists and Islam-bashers are mirrored in other parts of the world and cannot be understood without taking into account the ideologies embellishing the global onslaught against Islam.
The El-Moumni affair and beyond
In the Netherlands, lgbt-politics has largely come to be reduced to the question of a perceived lack of tolerance toward homosexuals among Muslims. The discourse that is put forward is one in which native Dutch citizens are construed as tolerant while society’s cultural ‘others’, especially Muslims, are represented as intolerant. Homophobia is construed to be alien to Dutch, modern, secular, society. The structural heteronormativity of society has almost completely disappeared from the movement’s discourse and from the struggle, while the question of Islam and tolerance has taken front-stage.
What could be wrong with tolerance? Would I perhaps prefer intolerance? Of course not, but if we would take a harder look at the concept and the way it was employed, we would be able to see that tolerance has a paradoxical meaning in present day society. It is accompanied, in fact, by virulent forms of intolerance and exclusion. To illustrate, we may have a look at the debate about Islam in the Netherlands starting in 2001. The Rotterdam imam El-Moumni, of Moroccon descent, in May 2001 made comments on national television arguing that homosexuality was an illness threatening reproduction and thus society in more general terms: classic patriarchal views. The comments caused enormous upheaval in Dutch society, in which people especially took offense because these views came from a cultural other, from ‘the outside’. The imam’s expressed views were taken to be comments on Dutch secular and modern society. In fact, only three years earlier, in 1998, during the Gay Games in Amsterdam, public homosexuality was fiercely debated in the Dutch public sphere. Several Dutch conservatives participated in that debate, arguing, among other things, that homosexuality was shameful and that they felt uncomfortable or offended by the public display of homosexuality during the games. Interestingly, Muslims played no role in this debate, and neither did the question of Islam in more general terms.
In 2001, on the other hand, the comments of El-Moumni were framed as ‘intolerant’, diametrically opposed to Dutch values, and construed as symbolic of the lack on cultural integration of Muslim communities in Dutch societies. The imam’s views, characteristic of conservative views on homosexuality in orthodox religious circles, were framed as representative of the whole of the Muslim community instead as the views of a specific, radical, current in Islam (El-Moumni belongs to a notoriously conservative mosque in Rotterdam). In public discourse, Islam became construed as completely and utterly antagonistic to modern, tolerant, Dutch ‘values’ and all the imams active in the Netherlands – including imams from the liberal Alavite community who have nothing whatsoever in common with orthodox figures like El-Moumni – were ‘invited’ for a lesson in tolerance by the liberal democratic minister of ‘large cities-affairs’. One of the prime participants in the attack on public homosexuality in 1998, the conservative columnist Van der List, who called homosexuality disgusting, in 2001 embraced the homosexual community that now needed protection against the horrible Muslim hordes who were a threat to liberal, tolerant, Dutchness.
A visibly uncomfortable prime-minister Kok spent the full ten minutes of his weekly interview on national television explaining to Muslims that they were to tolerate homosexuals, as this “was the Dutch way”. In a poll on the website of the largest Gay magazine, the mainstream, liberal populist Gay Krant, 91 percent of participants agreed with the statement that “Muslims should accept our tolerance or leave”. The widely read right-wing daily Telegraaf spoke of ideas coming from “the medieval deserts of Northern Africa” and gay members of the conservative liberal party VVD in Amsterdam published a pamphlet arguing that Muslims were threatening the liberal freedoms that were so characteristic to Dutch society.
Aesthetics of homosexuality
The message was clear: to be Dutch meant to adjust to certain ‘norms and values’ and to assimilate into the moral universe that constituted modern, tolerant Dutch society. Tolerance became one of the prime markers of ‘autochthony’. Helped by the events of 9/11, the single most successful right-wing populist in Dutch history, Pim Fortuyn, who as the reader may recall was brutally killed in 2002, instrumentalized this discourse of tolerant Dutchness to make his spectacular political staging possible. As a columnist, publicist, and public speaker, Fortuyn had tried for many years to get the Islamophobic, xenophobic, and nationalist view across that Muslims were retarded, that Dutch identity and modernity needed to be reappraised, and that the borders needed to be closed to immigrants, especially Muslims. For a long time, his views were seen as rather ludicrous and marginal, but during the 1990’s they slowly moved from the far right margins to the center of Dutch politics.
The right-wing populist party Livable Netherlands catapulted Fortuyn into the political arena in 2001. Fortuyn combined a personal, almost erotic, political aesthetic and charisma with neonationalist and Islamophobic political ideas and fulfilled a deep desire for belonging, meaning, direction, a closed and clear identity, and an ever more strictly defined definition of ‘the other’. Fortuyn wanted to embody the modern, free, tolerant, Dutch nation and did so by liberating the sexual norms and the aesthetics of part of the international and Dutch gay male community from the gay ghetto and bringing them into the Dutch public domain. As an essential part of this political discourse, Muslims were represented by Fortuyn as the exact opposites of the free, liberal, modern Dutch person. The former were represented as intolerant, primitive, and traditional, a triangle of alterity that made them quite incongruous with Dutch society. Obviously, the mass mediation of the homophobic comments of various orthodox Islamic figures in Dutch society like El-Moumni, and various affairs concerning visceral forms of homophobia in Muslim circles, helped Fortuyn greatly by reinforcing his point. Fortuyn’s recipe against what he dubbed ‘the agrarian backwardness’ of Islam: getting Dutch society back on the path of modernity and secularism through harsh integration policies and closed borders. Power and tolerance became completely entangled and emerged as a weapon in the hands of the populist and Islamophobic right.
Everyday homophobia
Would we turn our attention to the nationalist right in the Netherlands today, the politics of Geert Wilders’ Freedom Party or several populist right-wing media and Internet publications, we would see that tolerance is not quite characteristic of the politics of the far right. The tolerance towards homosexuality, merely discursive as opposed to practiced in everyday life, is accompanied by a growing intolerance toward Muslims and other immigrants, social outsiders, the poor. The culture of the Muslim minority is framed as an essential, natural, uniform, and a-historical whole while homophobia is construed to be alien to Dutch society. That narrative has rooted itself ever more deeply into Dutch society. As opposed to 1998, during the gay games – not very long ago – it is almost impossible today to imagine discussing lgbt-rights without bashing Islam and Muslims. The hegemonic narrative is that gay and lesbian emancipation is almost complete – as gays and lesbians are ‘tolerated’- and that the only problem left is the lack of integration of Muslims into Dutch society. However, the facts are quite different. Research shows that the official tolerance informing the self-image of the Dutch and ‘Dutch pride’ is not always congruous with the facts. Confronted with public homosexuality – like two men kissing – a large part of the population still responds with disgust and distaste. Sometimes this disgust leads to violence. While it is true that young Moroccan men are overrepresented among the perpetrators of homophobic violence in Amsterdam, research shows that this behavior cannot be reduced to the culture or religion of the young men involved. In fact, it is their social exclusion and marginality that is a more prominent candidate for blame.
Normalization
What causes the disgust mentioned above is heteronormativity, which is still a structural, essential aspect of Dutch society and moral order. In other words, heterosexuality remains the self-evident norm, a normativity which is reproduced through the family, in the educational system, popular culture, and media. The tolerated homosexual fits this heteronormativity very well: in almost every way he behaves according to heteronormative norms. As Steven Seidman says, the emphasis on tolerance has normalized homosexuality. The modern homosexual changed from a deviant, excluded other into the mirror-image of the ideal heterosexual. In a 2001 article on normalization, Seidman argues: "Normalization is made possible because it simultaneously reproduces a dominant order of gender, intimate, economic, and national practices”. He warns: "[L]egitimation through normalization leaves in place the polluted status of there marginal sexualities and all the norms that regulate our sexual intimate conduct apart from the norm of heterosexuality". He also points out: "Ultimately, normalization [renders] sexual difference a minor, superficial aspect of a self who in every other way reproduces an ideal of a national citizen".
As argued, many people in the Netherlands still look the other way, disgusted, shamed, when confronted with homosexuality in public. In such a heteronormative culture it needs not surprise that many homosexual men and women are depressed; that suicide rates among young gays and lesbians remain high; that transgenderism and other forms of gender nonconformity are ridiculed and transgenders are excluded; that violence keeps threatening the lgbt-community. The solution for such problems is not a politics based on tolerance, but on the struggle against heteronormativity.
In recent articles, the feminist philosopher Judith Butler rightly and harshly criticizes the confusion of sexual politics with the politics of empire and argues for a kind of sexual politics that resists Islamophobia, racism, and imperialism and that tries to find convergence points of antiracism and lgbt-struggles. Unfortunately, Butler doesn’t elaborate much. It is the task, it seems to me, of critical, antiracist, queer movements to think about and develop on forms of sexual politics beyond tolerance, against tolerance. The heteronormative society radical queers are fighting is the very society that excludes and discriminates against immigrants. Convergence points exist, for instance in the field of education where there is every reason to fight against both implicit heterosexuality as well as against the structural disadvantaging of girls and immigrant kids. Antiracists and lgbt-activists may also find each other in solidarity with lgbt’s from minority communities and in solidarity with homosexual refugees and their rights.
The reader may perhaps ask herself whether the author of the present article has gone mad. Isn’t the Netherlands in fact one of the ‘best’ countries to live in for lesbians or gay men, because they have in fact gained rights and a certain amount of acceptance and demanded their place in the public domain? Of course, this is true, and the gains of lgbt’s in the Netherlands must be defended and the public kiss-ins and similar actions organized by queers in response to homophobia must be supported and participated in. But we need a movement that is more than just responsive but that tries to constantly reinvent itself to fight the exclusion of deviant sexualities as effectively as possible, while doing everything to resist the instrumentalization of our struggles in the ‘war against terror’ and the ongoing onslaught against the Muslim community. I do not argue for intolerance, but for re-imagining political struggles in such a way that the structural causes of exclusion, discrimination, and violence assume center-stage again, for a queer movement that takes up the struggle against heterosexual normativity. Tolerance is ideology. We do not fight to become tolerated but to change the world. Tolerance is an ideological construct that disarms the lgbt-movement and positions us against as opposed to alongside ‘other’ oppressed minorities.
Paul Mepschen is an editor of the radical and socialist magazine and webzine Grenzeloos (www.grenzeloos.org) and a member of Socialist Alternative Politics, the Dutch section of the Fourth International. Paul works as a PhD-researcher on a project called ‘tangible belongings’, which deals with questions of citizenship, subjectivity, and aesthetics in local communities, at the Amsterdam School for Social science Research (ASSR), University of Amsterdam (UvA).
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IN MEMORIUM ..SADANAND MENON ON KAMALA

2009-06-05T07:01:00.005+05:30

Kamala (Das) Surayya — 1934-2009.

Sadanand Menon

It was as if, along with dolls, pent-up fantasies had tumbled out of the Old Playhouse of a nubile lass. Kamala Das’s first collection of poems, Summer in Calcutta, published in 1965, kicked up some dust in the rather placid universe of what was then called ‘Indo-Anglian’ writing. Here was a young woman unleashing a set of languid images redolent with the sensual charge of a white hot summer in which the body wanted to burst out of its bud and blossom in the fullness of the self. English writing in India, long past its tepid middle-age, had just discovered its own sexuality.
It didn’t take the 30-year-old mother of three very long to establish a toehold in the airy portals of Indian writing in English, sparsely populated as it was then with women poets. Popular English periodicals like The Illustrated Weekly of India, Quest, Eve’s Weekly, Femina and Imprint were beginning to devote some space to these new literary trends. Along with Eunice D’Souza, Qurratullain Hyder and Chandralekha, Kamala Das represented the voice of a newly emerging feminine consciousness of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which was not hesitant to bring into public matters otherwise considered personal. Of course, Ismat Chugtai had already opened the account on this front in the Urdu language.
However, to Kamala Das would go the credit of inaugurating a genre of ‘confessional’ writing which was to impact a large number of emerging women writers in English and regional languages who would find the courage to explore their deeper desires and, even more forcefully into the 1990s, their body.
Her subsequent collections of poetry in English like Descendants (1967), Old Playhouse and Other Poems (1973), Alphabets of Lust (Novel, 1977) or Only the Soul Knows How to Sing (1996) continued in much the same vein — the cry of a woman looking to cast aside the fetters and restrictions imposed by a male society. The quality of poetry was inconsistent; but the quality of intensity was sustained.
But it was not until her rather premature, narcissistically self-absorbed and gauche autobiography, My Story in 1976, that Kamala Das earned both a sort of national recognition and national notoriety. Told in a breathless, if padded tone, the narrative played with unrestrained sensuality and seemed more than eager to tell-it-all. While it provoked the conservative and titillated those seeking the salacious, what most people missed in the eager, gushing narrative was the fantasy and humour of it. The writer was simply having a blast and leading on her readers to a space where they might all have secretly wished to go. If, in her poem An Introduction she had written: I am every/Woman who seeks love; in the autobiography she becomes every woman who resolves a life of drudgery by escaping to an exotic garden of forbidden delights. It was ceaseless fantasy in a playhouse of infinite imagination.
The half-a-dozen or more times I met her and had longish conversations, she came through as a sober, self-contented, even conventional woman who was affection and warmth personified. There was no attempt to shock or provoke. But she had her eyes wide open and, during an extended chat with her once in her home in Kerala even as she fussed over her tiny grandchild, she minced no words in berating the literary and political establishment of the State which was chauvinistically male-dominated and sought to put her down.
In her other avatar as Madhavikutty, the front-ranking short-story writer and novelist in Malayalam, this was a criticism well directed. She certainly went through phases of isolation and alienation in the literary landscape of the State, even as she shone as a beacon of hope and aspiration for an emerging generation of women writers, for whom her iconoclasm and ‘coming-out-of-the-closet’ courage (even if it was make-believe) provided a roadmap for both honest and feminist writing.
Kamala (Das) Surayya was, however, no feminist herself. She made no pretence of speaking ‘on behalf’ of anyone or any cause. But her concerns, ranging from creative freedom and the need to dream and express sexual desire within a personal space to openly admit to being in a state of erotic insatiability was to open a valuable ‘womanist’ space within literature and politics.
It proposed an independent, autonomous sexual agency for women uncontrolled and unpatrolled by patriarchal yardsticks. However, the contemporary critic would say the fantasy was largely heterosexual and privileged a romantic space for man represented as the eternal lover, Krishna. For example, in Maggots (1967), a pining Radha laments the departure of Krishna even as a solicitous husband asks her if his kisses hurt. Her reply is quintessential Kamala Das:
What is/ it to the corpse if maggots nip?
Without Krishna, the woman is left to be a pining corpse.
Other excitements in her life included the bold move in 1999 to convert to Islam, making the political claim that, as a woman, she felt more protected in that religion. This, for once, was no fantasy. She stuck to her resolve and stayed true to her belief. It is nothing short of extraordinary that now she is provided a State funeral as a practising Muslim.
Kamala Surayya will be remembered for her writings in English and Malayalam. She will be remembered more for boldly adopting something like a maverick, enfant terrible, feminist posture, which became the window through which radical feminism could soon step in to articulate its sexual politics in India.
In her work, the playhouse metamorphoses into a mansion of real possibilities

Dr.Binayak Sen

2009-06-02T08:45:00.002+05:30

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssokdhx7B6Q
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5u4K81duOQ0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I8xmEee6s7I
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OTW0Mnd7E4M

SHE has become immortal

2009-05-31T10:35:00.010+05:30

The one and the only one Kamala...
I read her my storywhen I was studying in upperprimary classes. I bought the book in 1976 for Rs 6/- Since then I have been reading her . I don'twish to assess her contributions right now, because all the significant people have done it in different channels and print media is also not far behind. It's a media over kill. But iam happy since a literary genius got such a large space .
Now I am thinking about two incidents which happened quite recently. The conversion in to Islam and leaving kerala to go to Pune .
To comprehend them a reading of one of her famous story "Neipayasam "is crucial .

Kindly read the translation of her story "Neipayasam"

Sweet milk

The Little Magazine
Family Vol III : issue 1

Kamala Das

A man, returning home at night from a simple cremation, having thanked everyone. We could simply call him Achhan. Because only three children in the city know his value. They call him Achha.
Sitting in the bus among strangers, he went over every second of that day.
Woke up in the morning to her voice. "Unniye, don’t go on sleeping covered up like that. It’s Monday." She was calling the eldest son. She then moved to the kitchen, her white sari crumpled. Brought me a big glass of coffee. Then? What happened then? Did she say anything that should not be forgotten? However much he tried, he could not remember. "Don’t go on sleeping covered up like that. It’s Monday." Only that line lingered. He chanted it to himself, as if it was a prayer. If he forgot it, the loss would be unbearable.
The children had been with him when he left for work in the morning. She brought them their tiffin in small aluminium boxes. A smear of turmeric on her right hand.
At work, he did not think of her at all. They had married, against the wishes of their parents, after a courtship of a year or two. But they never did regret it. Lack of money, the children’s spells of illness — they were often dejected. She became careless of her appearance. To an extent, he lost the ability to laugh.
Still, they loved each other. Their three children also loved them. They were boys. Unni, 10, Balan, 7, and Rajan, 5. Three boys whose faces were always smeared with dirt, who had neither outstanding beauty nor brilliance. But the mother and the father said to each other —
"Unni is always making things. He has a taste for engineering."
"We should make Balan a doctor. See his forehead: such a wide forehead denotes intelligence."
"Rajan is not afraid of the dark. He is smart. He should join the army."
They lived in a narrow street in the city, in a middle-class neighbourhood. A three-room flat on the first floor, with a veranda just wide enough for two people to stand in. Mother grows a panineer plant in a pot. It has not flowered yet.
In the kitchen, brass spatulas and ladles hang from the hooks on the wall. A wooden plank lies near the stove. Mother usually sits there, making chapatis when Father returns from work.
He got off when the bus stopped. He felt a twinge of pain in the knee. The beginning of arthritis? Who will look after the children if I am bedridden? Suddenly, his tears welled up. He rubbed his face with a dirty kerchief and quickened his step.
Have the children gone to sleep? Had they eaten anything, or had they just cried themselves to sleep? But they are too young to understand. Unni just stood there watching me when I put her in the taxi. Only the youngest one cried. But that was because he wanted to get into the taxi too. Certainly, they did not know the meaning of death.
Did I know? No. Did I ever imagine that she would suddenly fall down one evening and die, without saying farewell to anyone?
He had looked in through the kitchen window when he came back from work. She was not there.
He could hear the sound of children playing in the front yard. "First-class shot." It was Unni calling out.
He opened the front door with his key. It was then that he saw her. She was lying on the floor. Her lips were parted. She must have slipped, he thought. But at the hospital the doctor told him: "She died an hour and a half ago. It was heart failure."
He was swept by a welter of emotions. He was angry with her for no reason. How could she go, without any warning, burdening me with all the responsibilities!
Now who would bathe the children? Who would cook for them? Who would look after them when they fell ill?
"My wife died," he whispered to himself, "my wife died suddenly today of a heart attack. I need two days’ leave."
A great leave application. Leave, not because the wife is ill. Leave, because the wife is dead. The boss might call him to his room. He might express his sorrow. His sorrow! Who wants it? He didn’t know her. He didn’t know her hair that curled at the ends, her tired smile, her slow step. All these are his losses.
When he opened the door his youngest son came running up. "Mother isn’t back yet," he said.
How quickly he has forgotten! Did he really think that the body that was taken away in the taxi would come back alone?
He took him to the kitchen.
"Unni," he called.
"What is it, Achha?"
Unni came into the kitchen.
"Balan is sleeping."
"All right. Have you all eaten anything?"
"No."
He removed the plates covering the vessels kept on the sill. Chapatis, rice, potato curry, chips, curds — the food she had made. In a glass bowl, the neipayasam that she sometimes made for the children.
No, they should not eat this food. It is touched by death.
"These have gone cold. I’ll make some uppumavu," he said.
"Achha..." it was Unni.
"Um?"
"When will Mother come back? Isn’t she better?"
Let the truth wait for another day, he thought. There was no point in giving grief to the child tonight.
"Mother will come," he said.
He placed the washed bowls on the floor. Two bowls.
"Let Balan sleep," he said.
"Achha, neipayasam," Rajan exclaimed happily. He dipped a finger in it.
He sat down on the wooden plank where his wife usually sat.
"Unni, will you serve? Achhan does not feel too good. Headache."
Let them eat. They would never again be able to eat their mother’s cooking.
They started eating the payasam. He sat motionless, watching them.
"Don’t you want rice, Unni?"
"No, we want only payasam. It’s very tasty."
"Yes, Mother has made splendid neipayasam," Rajan said happily.
He got up and walked quickly towards the bathroom.
Translated from the Malayalam story ‘Neipayasam’ by Sindhu V. Nair with The Little Magazine..

Her real life and literay life are not running parallel, instead they are intertwined.Almost one and the same. Is there anything in this story that would explain her actions and behaviour.?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UbDPih_qLw

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OMCmADmDZmk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxAE6IVzlso
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePdeHLXuhMI

Noam Chomsky Interview on CBC

2009-05-28T10:38:00.001+05:30

Noam Chomsky Interview on CBC (Part 1 of 2)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10rTPSSmOFw
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bieFwutoqvA