“Slumdog Star for Sale” scream the headlines of a British tabloid, News of the World. Across the Atlantic a New York Times reader suggests:

The best thing that could happen to these poor little kids–Rubina and the little boy–would be for them to be adopted out of their terrible family situations…..

There are other people whose hearts bleed even more:

…..If I had the money, I would buy her in a heartbeat. I watched the movie Saturday and my goal in life is to now travel the world and adopt one child from all of the poorest countries. Too bad I can’t have them all.

A documentary critic proclaims:

As horrific and shocking as it is, (the) news……should — most unfortunately — come as no overwhelming surprise.

Presumably because the poor sell their kids into sexual slavery all the time (Note: sexual slavery is immediately assumed) She goes on to suggest we watch ‘Born Into Brothels’ and ‘Highway Courtesan’ to get the Indian perspective.

Piecing the story together, it seems that the tabloid entrapped the family by posing as an Arab couple (being Arab increases the pathology, get it?), and offered to adopt Rubina and pay $300,000 to the family. This exchange took place via a translator since Rubina’s father doesn’t actually speak English. Rubina’s parents are divorced and the relationship between her parents is far from cordial. The mother wants custody of her daughter, the papers say after the film came out, but it could be an ongoing conflict, we don’t know.

There are a couple of interesting things in this story, firstly everyone is outraged at the father for considering adoption. This is hardly unusual, poor people have often given up their kids up to foster care for a time (the example of filmmaker Stan Brakhage comes to mind, he was in an orphanage for a while), and in India, its not unusual for kids to grow up in places other than their parents house - I lived with my aunt for a while, and my brother grew up at my grandparents place. The ideal of the soccer mom based nuclear family is quite recent. Yes, I get it, the proposed exchange of money is what really bothers people and everyone is sickened by the avariciousness of the family. Now if most people look into their family histories, they’re sure to find that uncle who took everything the other siblings should have inherited a fair share of. Yes, its terrible that people are greedy and criminal, but its hardly the province of the poor. So I wish people would take their outrage to where it belongs - a grossly unjust world where some countries are far richer than they deserve to be, and some people have the luxury of taking the moral high ground without every having to interact with the poor.

Finally, I am just outraged that a tabloid would go in and entrap this family to look as bad as possible, and even more outraged that they would do it to a poor, ill-educated family that does not have the means to fight back. But somehow the newspaper reports have glossed over that fact. I am even more sickened by all the well-meaning bleeding hearts who want to take away poor children away from their families. But we’ve seen that before - in Australia with mixed race and Aboriginal children, in Canada with Native American children, in India with the children of so called Thugs (actually they were forcibly sterilized as well) and Criminal Tribes.

Here is what we sent out to all the people who have been so supportive and kind over the course of making this film. You can sign up for our quarterly updates on our website.

HAPPY YEAR OF THE OX!

Over the summer we returned to Chharanagar to record the film sound track, Shashwati edited the 200 hours of footage down to a 3 hour rough cut, together with Henry Schwarz we started a 501(c)3 non-profit to help support India’s Denotified and Nomadic Tribes, and Kerim wrote an academic paper about the documentary films of Dakxin Chhara. More recently we have been working on the final 90 min cut of the film which we hope to have done by the end of March. If all goes well, postproduction should be done by the end of the year.

RETURN TO CHHARANAGAR

Each time we return to Chharanagar it feels more and more like home. Yet, at the same time, we are made acutely conscious of how rapidly the world we have captured on film has changed while we were away. Some changes were heartbreaking, others were heartening, even inspiring. Because of our focus on audio recording, this trip was a bit different from previous ones. In the past we’ve spent almost all of our time there talking to the actors and their families. This time, however, we wanted to capture the local sounds and extensive musical talent within the community to make a sound track that gives a sense of place. One of our inspirations is this video for M.I.A.’s song, Bird Flu, which we feel captures something important about what it is like to be in such an urban space. (Just saw Slumdog Millionaire and they use M.I.A’s music for a similar effect.)

Since neither of us are particularly talented musically, we looked for some help. We were very lucky to find an excellent musician who not only has experience working on film scores (he’s worked together with Shashwati on other film projects), but who also has experience traveling and working in India. John Plenge doesn’t speak Hindi, but he does speak “music,” and having him there allowed us to explore Chharanagar in a whole new way.

Working with John, we met wedding bands, a dubbing artist who sings vocals for the Gujarati film industry, and heard folk songs sung by women at weddings. I’m not trained in ethnomusicology, but I was struck by how this musical project transformed our experience of the community. Music is always a part of life there, being blasted out of rooftop speakers every day for some wedding, festival, or just because. But not being particularly knowledgeable about music I never would have explored this aspect of life there if it hadn’t been for John.

Another world opened up for us through the participation of John’s assistant, his teenage son John Adam. John Adam was a big hit with the younger members of the community who immediately befriended him. Usually shy and reserved when talking to us, all that disappeared when they were with John Adam. Our last day in Chharangar was “friendship day” but because John and John Adam had to leave early, Shashwati and I had to accept all the friendship bracelets the children had made for John Adam. We were happy to accept, even though we knew it wasn’t really meant for us.

Sadly, our good feelings about being back in Ahmedabad were shattered by the explosion of 21 terrorist bombs around the city while we were there. Although we were safely on the outskirts of the city, we were worried by the possibility of communal violence in retribution for the attacks. Luckily, that did not happen (just as it did not happen after the recent violence in Bombay). Instead, people simply went on with their lives, determined not to be cowed by terror. After a day off to see if it was safe or not, we too returned to work. For anyone who wants to better understand the history of communal violence in Gujarat, I highly recommend Martha Nussbaum’s book, “The Clash Within: Democracy, Religious Violence, and India’s Future.”

You can also download a podcast of her lecture on the topic at the University of Chicago’s website.

CARVING A STORY OUT OF VIDEO TAPE

Over the past five years we shot over two hundred hours of tape, all of which Shashwati transcribed, color coded, and cataloged. It may seem like a lot, but unlike a fiction film, where you know the story before you shoot, documentary filmmakers can only have an inkling of where the real drama will lie. Shashwati began by cutting together dozens of individual scenes, each of which holds together on its own, but doesn’t necessarily have a place in the larger story we want to tell. We then reviewed these scenes together and discussed how they would work to tell a story. This was the initial three hour cut we brought with us to Chharanagar. We deliberately kept as much in this version as possible because we wanted to make sure that the film subjects had a chance to respond to each of the scenes in case there were any they felt strongly about, one way or another. In fact, the reaction was overwhelmingly positive, and the only request was that we have more about the effect of the theater on the lives of the actors, something we asked about in our followup interviews while we were there.

Now the biggest task is to take what is now a three and a half hour film and carve out of it a story which is both dramatically engaging, informative, and easy for the audience to follow. The last task is especially difficult considering the large number of characters in the film. Our solution has been to adopt a somewhat traditional three-act structure in which Budhan Theatre itself is the main protagonist - actualized in the lives and struggles of its various members and their families. I don’t want to give too much away, but Shashwati and I are very excited about this structure and hope to have a new cut of the film soon.

A HELPING HAND

In addition to collaborating closely with the community during the production and editing of the film, we also wanted to make sure that once the film is out there is a way for audience members touched by the story to become involved in the community. With help from our co-producer, Henry Schwarz, we founded a 501(c)3 non-profit whose goal is to help India’s Denotified and Nomadic Tribes. Because we are new to the non-profit world we decided to start small. We have limited our current activities to supporting the Chharanagar library run by Budhan Theatre. This library is much more than a library; its a community center and an informal school as well. But its first and foremost a library - and a very good one at that! It houses a large collection of (mostly donated) books in three languages: English, Hindi, and Gujarati. Each book has been carefully cataloged and given a call number! It costs about US$1000 per year to maintain and we have already successfully raised enough money to keep it running through the end of 2009. Our goal now is to create a more long term solution for funding the library by getting 5 to 20 people to pledge between $50 and $200 a year on an ongoing basis. If you’d like to become a library sponsor, please sign up here:

http://vimukta.org/donate/sponsor

More information about the library (including pictures and video) on the Vimukta website:

http://vimukta.org/2008/09/02/more-than-a-library/

Once we have the library funding secured we hope to expand our program to do other things. Our first priority is to set up a scholarship program for girls. If anyone has experience working with girl’s education in the developing world or underprivileged communities, please contact us.

FUTURE PLANS

We have a lot in store for the next year. We hope to completely redesign our website, choose a new name for the film, upload trailers to the internet, finish work on a book of portraits Kerim shot while in Chharanagar, and begin marketing our film to potential distributors. List members will be the first to know of these developments.

Best wishes for the new year!

Kerim & Shashwati
http://fournineandahalf.com/

Daily Kos has a post about the DREAM Act:

Each year approximately 2.8 million students graduate from US High Schools. Some will go on to college, join the military, or take other paths in life, hopefully all becoming productive members of society.

But for approximately 65,000 of them, these opportunities will never be available. Not because they lack motivation, or achievement, but because of the undocumented status passed on to them by their parents.

The DREAM Act would allow these kids to do the things other people take for granted like being able to go to college, get a driver’s license, and get a job. It would allow them to participate fully in society, in the only country they know.

There are a couple of videos in the post. The first one was produced by Theresa Thanjan and me, and the music was composed by John Plenge. Theresa and I also did a music video of a song, ‘I have a dream,’ written by a couple of the kids.

Two very different op-eds in the New York Times that make an interesting juxtaposition. The first, by Gurcharan Das (Das is a right wing thinker– neo-liberal, anti-reservation, but not a Hindutva sympathizer) which has an essentialist, “India Shining” trajectory with a Reaganite twist:

….common saying among Indians that “our economy grows at night when the government is asleep.”

And the second, by Paul Krugman talks about the Republican contempt for government as being a product of its decision to “make itself the party of racial backlash”

Where did this hostility to government come from? In 1981 Lee Atwater, the famed Republican political consultant, explained the evolution of the G.O.P.’s “Southern strategy,” which originally focused on opposition to the Voting Rights Act but eventually took a more coded form: “You’re getting so abstract now you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is blacks get hurt worse than whites.” In other words, government is the problem because it takes your money and gives it to Those People.

Here is biker Santa greeting visitors in front of a Hualien City government office:

Biker Santa

My friend Kristin recently went to Dubai on vacation. And she took some pictures, which she posted for her friends. It included this one with a note saying, “I have no idea what it says.” So I asked my friend Niam, who lives in Doha, if she knew what it said. Here is our little exchange (I know its all a bit self-indulgent, but humor me folks) for your pleasure (edited down):

Niam:
This is not Arabic. I think its Urdu. It looks as if an Urdu poster version for an Arab film though, but I can’t be sure as I don’t have any idea what the words mean.

Shashwati:
Oh, I can understand Urdu, just can’t read the script. So if you can give me the transliteration I can probably get it. It looks like movie posters from 15 years ago in India, when they still hand painted them.

Niam:
Ok, the main title reads like “Injmen” or “anjaman.” The name above it is naghmati shanikar and the words below it look like
vak ardornkayn film

Shashwati:
Ohhhh, its probably Anjuman, which means meeting, association, getting together. The names seem like Tamil names, but the words below I can’t figure it out-probably the film company’s acronym. I found a reference to a Pakistani film from 1970 that looks like a good match.

Niam:
Thats it! The actor names are the same. Waheed Murad, Rani, Deeba, etc. lol. Thats so funny. And enlightening

We are all feeling absurdly pleased at this bit of detective work. I am curious about the film and want to get hold of a copy to watch. Pakistani soap operas were hugely popular in India in the 80’s and avidly exchanged in the black market. The film looks like it would contain the same pleasures.

Here are some photos of my favorite breakfast place in town.

Traditional Taiwanese Breakfast Place

They make almost everything from scratch, which is why it tastes so good.

Eggs!

Lots of oil is going into these eggs. And note the fried bread sticks on the side.

Their flat bread is the best in the city

These are a cross between a nan and mughlai paratha, and very very tasty.

Here is a review I did for Shrabani Basu’s Spy Princess: The Life of Noor Inayat Khan for the Sawnet website:

The story of Noor Inayat Khan is a remarkable one. A descendant of Tipu Sultan, Noor’s father was a musician and a Sufi teacher. Her mother was an American from New Mexico, who defied her family to marry the much older Inayat Khan. Noor was the eldest child in this non-traditional household. The Khans lived in Paris, where Noor went to the local school, while her father and uncles ran the Sufi Order International and gave music performances.

Noor might have become a leading author and illustrator of children’s stories, when history intervened, and she became a radio operator working for the British secret service in World War II.

Shrabani Basu’s ‘Spy Princess’ is a meticulously researched biography of this World War II heroine. Basu takes care to not make any claims she can’t back up with documentary evidence. She is very careful to avoid exoticizing Noor as some sort of a Mata Hari figure of popular imagination. Using papers that were declassified in 2003 and Noor’s personal papers, Basu sticks to the facts. At times, this can make for some dry prose. However, Noor herself is a heroine to the writer, who sees her as a brave and gentle soul who followed the dictates of her conscience. This creates an interesting tension in the writing. On one hand it almost reads like the research notes of a diligent graduate student– quite often we find out the exact date and wording of a banal memo, coupled with hagiographic asides about Noor’s patriotic feelings. This has a curiously flattening effect, especially in the first part of the book which deals with Noor’s childhood and adolescence. We get the relevant facts about the Inayat Khans and Noor, but it doesn’t add up to a complete picture. One senses that the Inayat Khans are a brilliant family who have to deal with an uncertain financial situation, and depend on the goodwill of their followers to be able to live. Indeed, their home in Paris, Fazal Manzil was donated to them by a rich Dutch aristocratic follower of the Sufi order. This is not a typical bourgeousie family.

By all accounts, Noor’s family was an unusual one, probably more so by virtue of the era, when a mixed race family of musicians and Sufi teachers must have brought its own baggage of being held in high esteem in some quarters, and viewed with suspicion in others. But its hard to get a sense of what it was like to be such a family in that particular time. Perhaps, in the interest of keeping the book focussed on Noor, Basu does not provide the sort of context which would be required to get such an insight. She performs her role as a writer as one who reports back to us only what she could tangibly observe, rather than as a social scientist who can bring in other strands of knowledge to help us see things in a new way. Or a documentary writer who sticks to the “facts” but nevertheless understands the imperatives of narrative.

In all of this, Noor herself disappears. She emerges more or less a paragon of virtue. A dutiful daughter, loving to a fault; a diligent student with an artistic bent. We don’t really get a sense that she is a complicated person, with contradictions. To be fair, it is hard to get to know Noor, who doesn’t seem to have left too many clues about her internal life. And with so many people who were close to her now dead, it is difficult to actually fathom her motives and feelings. Especially glaring, is the opacity of one of the most important romantic attachments in Noor’s life, to a Romanian Jewish musician and fellow student. The only thing we learn about him is that he had the surname Goldman. Noor’s family disapproved of the relationship and apparently it was a source of great stress to her. Basu is very careful to not say anything that might be construed as being critical about the family, probably in deference to Noor’s brother and nephews who made their family papers available to her. So the tone of the writing may be very objective, but it ends up not being very revealing.

The book picks up during the war years. The writers fondness for bureaucratic minutae serve the book well when describing the working of the covert Special Operations Executive (SOE). They seem to have left enough of a paper trail to demonstrate their incompetence and amateurishness. If you are fond of reading memos and bureaucratic entries, this section is actually pretty exciting. Through cumulative detail, Basu manages to convey the danger and drudgery of covert operations during the war. She is able to throw into sharp relief Noor’s bravery and intelligence. It seems that though Noor was a talented and smart radio operator, she was not well suited to spy work. She could be careless of her personal safety, was liable to leave her code book lying around, and was hopeless at dealing with the simulated interrogation she was put through. Being a radio operator was one of the most dangerous jobs during the war, since the likelihood of detection was very high. Despite this, the shortage of radio operators in enemy territory prompted the SOE to send Noor to France, before she was quite ready.

Despite her unsuitability to be a spy, Noor performed her duties with success and dedication. In the end, she was betrayed to the Gestapo. Noor tried to escape on several occasions and was ultimately deported to Dachau. After suffering the horrors of solitary confinement, being chained, starved and beaten, Noor was executed in 1944.

Noor Inayat Khan is a difficult subject. She remains elusive, all we are left of her are a mosaic of details that hopefully focus into a gestalt.

Another bomb has gone off in the capital, killing a 13 year old boy, meanwhile the authorities continue to posture and nobody seems to mind.

I’ve been reading about the bomb blasts since August with increasing alarm.  Two people have been shot, and a police officer lost his life in an “encounter” in Delhi, and three others were arrested near my alma mater in Delhi. Its very clear from this picture (Thanks YS) who those three are.

Why are the three kids wearing kaffiyehs? Nobody in India wears a kaffiyeh. We are not shy about wearing head gear, but a Palestinian kaffiyeh is not part of the sartorial vocabulary. In fact, according to the police, the leader:

..was against the typical looks of a bearded Muslim youth and encouraged workers to wear jeans and trousers.

So who put this head gear made fashionable by Arafat on these kids?  The police have shown great alacrity in finding the culprits, as they should (one can only hope for such promptness when VHP and Bajrang Dal go on the rampage). One has to wonder whether the meaning of this picture can be found in these questions about  what has been going on:

1) It has been widely reported (and not refuted by the Police) that in early August this year Atif, who is described by the Delhi Police as the mastermind behind the recent terrorist bombings in Jaipur, Ahmedabad and Delhi, underwent a police verification exercise along with his four roommates in order to rent the apartment they were staying in Jamia Nagar.

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