A new blog by a friend, “James Madison,” who is also selling his/her rights for anybody who will pay for them. There are photos of the protest by James Madison here.

An interview with Mira Nair on the eve of the release of Vanity Fair. Its got the obligatory tribute to Nair’s “vibrant colors” etc, and Nair explaining middle class India’s connection with English Literature, but its quite a nice interview otherwise. I admire Mira Nair’s ability to give good interviews, like the this one in the New York Times.

I hope the good folks at Sepia Mutiny don’t get into trouble for posting this entry on who the Indian American delegates are at the RNC. A New York Times story via Body and Soul

The Justice Department has opened a criminal investigation and is demanding records regarding Internet postings by critics of the Bush administration that list the names of Republican delegates and urge protesters to give them an unwelcome reception in New York City.

On another note, the RNC delegation seem pretty pleased that Bush took out time to be interviewed on India Abroad, as reported by Rediff.com which also reports that Katherine Harris the “heroine of 2000″ came to their party! and that W invited the star Republican fundraiser to the White House to see a movie. All this giddiness at being noticed by the man! I suppose if you are “white on probation” its a rather precarious position to be in, so you are grateful for every step forward (if this is progress), and it probably makes you much more paranoid than a bunch of free-wheeling bloggers, so I am sure the Mutineers are not losing any sleep.

Indian spirituality has long been one of India’s greatest exports, and the US has always been a destination, not just for the swami’s of every ilk, but also Quakers, Shakers, home grown Mormons (thought they didn’t have it very easy when they first started) and Scientologists. Now the US can make spirituality its latest export as well. Along with accusations of cultural imperialism, the US can look forward to being blamed for foisting its particular brand of capitalist-spiritualism on the world. According to The Guardian:

The US Kabbalah Centre, the movement’s most powerful body, wants to open a dedicated Kabbalah school near London. In October it will start a 10-week pilot programme involving 30 pupils at an unnamed non-Jewish school in Hertfordshire. The US Kabbalah Centre, the movement’s most powerful body, wants to open a dedicated Kabbalah school near London. In October it will start a 10-week pilot programme involving 30 pupils at an unnamed non-Jewish school in Hertfordshire.

I had a friend in school, who was a practicing Rabbi, and he told me that in order to study the Kabbalah, you had to be over forty, and could only study it in the early hours of the morning, around 3 am or so, but a mere technicality like this doesn’t seem to bother the folks at this Center. The London Rabbis aren’t too happy either:

…the project is alarming Jewish leaders. London rabbi Yitzchak Schochet said: ‘The fact that they are now peddling their gibberish to children only compounds the tragedy of how the good name of Judaism is being brought into ill repute.’ But the project is alarming Jewish leaders. London rabbi Yitzchak Schochet said: ‘The fact that they are now peddling their gibberish to children only compounds the tragedy of how the good name of Judaism is being brought into ill repute.’

There is concern about a number of Kabbalah practices. Some recruits have told how they were pressured to hand over large sums of money to the movement. Others said they were told to sever their ties with friends and family who expressed scepticism about the faith.

But this is what the London rabbis are up against:

A recruitment drive could prove popular with British children, however. Britney Spears and David Beckham have both been seen wearing the red bracelets while Naomi Campbell is a recent convert.

I guess the swamis have some competition.

I have always felt a certain amount of discomfort with spiritual consumption. Some years ago we had gone to visit my brother-in-law who was living in Berlin, and almost everyone we met, was really into the fact that the family was Jewish (not me though, I am a Hindu), and lots of them were into the Kabbalah, it was kind of creepy. I’ve met lots of people in the States who are into Native American spiritual practices or Tibetan Buddhism, so I suppose anytime there is a new spiritual fad the people of that culture should worry, it just might be a sure sign that they are on the way out and are in the process of being museumized! or am I just cynical and paranoid?

Thanks to Tom Vick, I now know of Green Cine Daily, an extensive film related blog. They have lots of good entries on Asian Cinema, among other things.

There is an interview with Takeshi Miike that I can recommend. I haven’t nearly seen as much Miike as I would like to. We discovered him right after 9/11. We were in a daze, and sort of depressed, with that low-level dark fog that can descend on you when you feel you are living through a particularly bad historical moment, there is nothing personal about it. I suppose we intuited what was coming down the pike. Anyway, Audition was the only interesting looking film that was playing in the city, so we went. It was so scary and horrifying, and beautiful, that it shocked us out of our mental state. It somehow calmed us down. I have been a fan of Miike ever since.

The other article I enjoyed reading, is by Priya Lal about the reception of Bollywood. It goes beyond the usual tendency of recounting Bollywood’s baroque surfaces, and talks about Bollywood as a product of modernity and its reception as such all over the world.

An interview with Homi Bhaba in The Hindu. It has a nice discussion of writers and their connection with history and politics, and where it all leaves the creative person. Here is an excerpt:

Q: Are you saying that politics and ideologies have become more important to literature and criticism, along with language and genre?

A: No. I’m saying that there are certain genres where politics and ideology are very important. In late 19th Century France, Balzac and Zola revealed their world’s angst, to use a word with which you started. To Zola, naturalism was a way of showing inequalities; he was also committed to the ideology of the form.

The Soviet realist novel hoped to transform society according to certain ideals. Bertolt Brecht produced plays to expose fascism. Some have always privileged the ideological and the political. The worst are just ideologues; the best have transformed aesthetic and ethical forms even when they were most political and historical.

Q: Don’t we often judge Third World writers on such meta-literary considerations?

Third world literature was once supposed to do the work of anthropology or history, (Khushwant Singh and Mulk Raj Anand did it very well) particularly when critiqued by the West. A Caribbean writer describing everyday reality was praised but if he dealt with more symbolic realism he was an obscurantist for the West, and condemned by compatriots for class treachery.

This tension between form and politics, is quite interesting in this exchange, the common sensical idea is that politics is quite divorced from form, that is, if a book is a work of “Art” it must be somehow free of politics. In screenwriting classes, I had running battles with some of the professors, because I found that it was impossible to tell certain stories when they were stuffed into the three act structure and when characterizations depended on certain assumptions about human psychology and motivations. The other burdens on the Third World writer are a whole other discussion, so I’ll leave it at that.

The ice Shiva Lingam at Amarnath, melted ten days ago. The pressure of pilgrims, and the lighting of incense and the flash of cameras are said to be responsible for this melting. From the story its not clear if all of its gone completely or simply shrank in size. Here are some photos of the shrine.

Sholay the 1975 classic curry western has been restored and opened to packed crowds in Bombay! The BBC reports that tickets to the movie are being sold in the black market. I don’t think I actually saw Sholay as a kid, but such was its power that I could recite several lines of dialogue at the drop of a hat. Later, for many of my colleagues at University, it became the fodder for our term papers. We owe our degrees to Sholay. Some time ago I showed this movie to a few old ladies in rural Minnesota, they found Sanjeev Kumar “cute,” and now he is back! in technicolor and digitally restored audio.

This remarkable film has been released on DVD. The Onion has a review:

Of the many colorful reviews Tod Browning’s Freaks prompted upon its 1932 release, few captured the film’s unique quality as aptly as these lines from The Boston Herald: “It is the sort of thing that, once seen, lurks in the dark places of the mind, cropping up every so often with a dourful persistence.” Oddly enough, the Herald didn’t mean this as an endorsement.

Tod Browning had spent time in a circus as a clown among other things, and knew many of the film’s actors. When the film came out it was considered rather disturbing by critics and audiences alike. MGM pulled the movie from theaters and it destroyed Tod Browning’s career.

Freaks is considered a horror movie classic, which may not be the appropriate genre for this film, horror films usually involve creatures who don’t act out of psychological motivations, they attack because its their nature to do so. While the “freaks” are examples of nature’s might, the film spends a lot of time with the freaks and treats them like characters– they go on dates, go on picnics, smoke cigarettes. The incredibly scary chase scene at the end is filmed to make the freaks look heroic and not the “normals.” This is not a film that treats its subjects with the touchy-feely kindness of a Mask, nor are they the devil of The Omen. Maybe that is what critics and audiences found so disturbing.

Freaks has inspired such diverse folks as the Kids in the Hall, with their chicken lady character, Bunuel and David Lynch.

Better not be seen with a camera if you are brown. I read this entry on Ishbadiddle a while ago, and forgot about it. Till tonight that is. I am editing a documentary on special registrations and detentions (a program btw that has not resulted in a single terrorist being caught). We needed some footage of the INS. So I sent off my colleague to go get it. There she was filming hapless immigrants herded like cattle in front of the INS building, when a man came charging at her. He was in no way connected to the INS, or the security of the building, but the situation was threatening enough that she fled. I guess he was being a good citizen and “said something, because he saw something,” I am just thankful that he didn’t have a gun.

Update: A disturbing story via Cursor.org.