An article in The Telegraph (thanks Diditi) highlights a film club that screens films in villages. Rather patronizingly titled, Reaching Ray to the Masses, it says:

“It all started in 2002 when we were working on a project in Amragachhi. We found that the villagers suffered an inferiority complex from watching the larger-than-life presentation in mainstream Hindi and Bengali films. So, we decided to screen films like Meghe Dhaka Tara, Pather Panchali, Bicycle Thieves, 400 Blows, Goopi Gayen Bagha Bayen and Bari Theke Paliye. They liked the films immediately as they could connect with the rawness of life,” says Chiranjeeb Mukherjee, who with three others formed Drishya to reach a different kind of reel magic to villagers.

The club has grown from four members to seventy, with screenings being expanded to other places in the country. Sadly, they show films on VCD.

There used to be many traveling film exhibition companies all over India. Photographer Jonathan Torgovnik documented one of the last remaining ones in Maharashtra in his book, Bollywood Dreams. A really wonderful book of photographs about other aspects of the industry as well. These companies were commercial ventures with ancient 35 mm projectors, they would go to where the audience was, set up a screen and show a movie. When I was in school, that is how films used to be shown to us. Mr. Movie Man (we actually called him that) would come with a projector and usually an ancient Tarzan movie. We would re-arrange our chairs, and take down the partition between the classrooms, the school was in the stables of the country house of one the local princely families, so if we wanted an assembly hall indoors, we had to re-arrange the partitions and move the desks out of the way. Once we were set up, the film would be introduced, the principle would tell us to behave and the movie would start. Once, by mistake, Mr. Movie Man put in a French film, it was fading and probably from 1960. It wasn’t anything special. A woman in a long coat and sunglasses walked into a beach cabin. She sat there, and then a man came in. And he kissed her, on the mouth! After that first kiss, there was either deadly silence or a collective gasp, then the lady took off her clothes, not all of them, but enough for the film to be stopped and reel yanked out. Then we were back to seeing “savages” and a full grown man leaping through trees, something much more salubrious for our tender psyches.

A few years later, the film projector was gone and replaced with a VCR, and by that time I was gone from the lovely grade school I had attended into the Convent. And that is how I first saw the “The Evil Dead,” on the feast day of the patron saint of our house.

A guest post by sociologist Diditi Mitra on Biju Mathew’s book, Taxi: Cabs and Capitalism in New York City.

In the book Taxi: Cabs and Capitalism in New York City, Biju Mathew (2005) seeks to contextualize the New York City taxi industry within the trajectories of global capitalism.

Mathew provides the reader with a history of the taxi industry, including the development of the industry as well as the changes in the source of labor for the industry. Additionally, Mathew discusses New York Taxi Workers Alliance’s (NYTWA), and its efforts to challenge industry level transformations and its accompanied exploitation of the worker, namely the taxi driver, that are inevitably a part of a capitalist progression, increasing concentration of power in the hands of the owners of the industry as well as the middle and upper class consumers in order to cheapen labor costs and increase profits.

While Mathew’s analysis provides useful insights into the taxi industry as well as the numerous ways in which the workers are subjugated, it could have benefited from a specified theoretical framework that connects all the different ideas expressed in the book. Mathew has a tendency to make generalizations (that working class South Asian immigrants are more aware of their racist beliefs than South Asian middle class immigrants) and glorify the worker.

Overall, the book is an important one for the following reasons: it uncovers the multiple ways in which the workers are exploited and more importantly, dehumanized; gives voice to the human beings who drive taxis in New York City; inspires those who would still like to believe in the revolution; and the book is an impassioned account of the lives of people who are made invisible with the label of a taxi driver.

The New York Times has an article about how undergraduate students on American campuses are suffering, due to their foreign born teachers:

With a steep rise in the number of foreign graduate students in the last two decades, undergraduates at large research universities often find themselves in classes and laboratories run by graduate teaching assistants whose mastery of English is less than complete.

A few years ago I heard a paper at an Asian American Studies conference that dealt with this issue. The researcher had found that when a group of students believed that a passage was being read by a Chinese American, they reported lower comprehension, and perhaps more important, they scored lower on comprehension tests, compared to a control group.

In all the years I taught, I felt compelled to give my, “You can jolly well understand me, and here is why” lecture on my first class, in my Convent School English (difficult to understand I am sure), doing justice, I hope to Miss Lal, the elocution teacher. When I could understand a Southern drawl watching “Gone With The Wind” in India, I didn’t see why my students felt okay about turning in poor work, or was it because their reading was in a foreign accent too?!

The article goes on to say:

The issue is particularly acute in subjects like engineering, where 50 percent of graduate students are foreign born, and math and the physical sciences, where 41 percent of graduate students are….. The encounters have prompted legislation in at least 22 states requiring universities to make sure that teachers are proficient in spoken English.

Half the people who were my colleagues in film school had no experience with a camera or microphone, yet were teaching classes in filmmaking. Not only that, many of them had very high teaching loads, which interfered with their ability to learn the very skills they were supposed to teach, even if it was in “accent-less” English (a thing I don’t think exists). I don’t suppose the legislators in those 22 states put out any money to hire more professors or improve English proficiency. In a situation where most universities rely heavily on cheap graduate student labor, and the Government considers education a lower priority than war, I don’t see how complaining about accents is going to do anything other than promoting xenophobia.

Update: Abhi at Sepia Mutiny has a post about the same article.

Kerim blogged about the attack by the police on filmmaker Vinod Raja, in Orissa, for filming a peaceful protest. There was an attack on the Indian People’s Tribunal on Communalism earlier this month, by Hindutva thugs for recording testimonials. On our last trip to India, we met a professor from Utkal University who said that she receives phone calls and people have actually turned up at her house to threaten her. Her crime? she was an organizer of a seminar after the Gujrat violence, and teaches Women’s Studies, something the local Hindutva folks find objectionable. All the news out of Orissa makes it sound more and more like Mississipi in the Civil Rights era. A quick look at the Wikipedia entry for Orissa says its one of the poorest states, with one of the lowest rates of literacy and health care. Orissa has a substantial population of Adivasis and Dalits, generally the most marginalized and exploited sections of Indian society. A lot of the rural population is landless. In response, the the Maoist Guerilla movements have been growing in the countryside. Its an unfortunate situation for a place that has so much going for it.

I have been catching up on movies and reading. One of the films I saw this week is The World of Henry Orient, based on a 1958 novel of the same name by Nora Johnson. It is a teenage girl buddy movie about Gil and Val, two upper middle class fourteen year olds in New York City, who develop a crush on a famous pianist, Henry Orient, played by Peter Sellers. Comedic and not so comedic adventures ensue, and by the end of the movie, the girls are delivered to the threshold of adulthood.

Other memorable female bonding movies I can recall are Thelma and Louise, Heavenly Creatures, and if you look for something closer to the Henry Orient era, The Trouble With Angels by Ida Lupino. In the previous two the women end up dead, or lesbian criminals, and in Angels one of the characters decides to become a nun, not a pathological event, but noteworthy for its eschewing of the world of makeup and boys which would be considered “normal” or at least usual in most movie universes. The girls in Henry Orient despite their problems are very healthy and normal. This lack of pathology usually associated with female buddy films is quite fascinating in itself, and may be due to the fact that the characters don’t deviate from a hetero-normative path. However, the villain of the film is one of the girls’ cold, cruel mother. So female pathology is responsible for some of the narrative drive of this film after all.

The world of the girls reminded me of the neurotic yet understandable teenage universe of Salinger, without the angst though, and much more like the melodramatic universe of Douglas Sirk, he is the man who made all those movies in the fifties that look like Hallmark cards. Todd Haynes paid homage to him in his movie Far From Heaven. Anyway, how this normalcy in the characters achieved? Mostly through the character of Henry Orient, who is an exotic dark creature with a vaguely Italian and Indian accent. In keeping with Henry’s character, the girls go as far as to pretend they are Chinese slaves and run around in peasant hats and light candles in front of some heathen God. This is all in the spirit of playacting, as they stalk the hapless Orient, who is trying to seduce a woman from Connecticut! One of the girls is a talented pianist and adores Henry because he is a famous pianist, but it turns out that he doesn’t practice and performs quite badly. Now before you dip into your Edward Said to talk about the film, you should know that Henry Orient is really from Brooklyn, and even loses his exotic accent at a stressful moment. He is playacting too, it allows him to indulge his favorite sport-skirt chasing, and the image seems to work for the persona of a famous pianist.

This rather enjoyable film manages to be subversive and conventional at the same time. And it is well-made in that fifties kind of way. And God knows what else it can tell us about the fifties, feminism and race relations.

Filmmaker Rakesh Sharma was detained and harassed by the police in New York City on May 13. His crime? he was filming New York City streets while being brown and wearing that hirsute badge of suspicion, a full grown beard. Ironically, he was here to screen his documentary on mass murder, Final Solution.

Sharma has filed a formal complaint. There is also a petition on his behalf that you can sign.

Here is a blog from a photographer, Masood Kamandy, who has set up a phtography program in Kabul University. Its funny how accounts of hanging out at expat bars are the same, no matter which part of the world you are in. Especially noteworthy on the blog are the photographs by his students. Unlike the usual images of gun toting Afghans and war torn poverty, the students’ photographs are beautifully mundane scenes of people making tea or looking out of their balconies, these pictures have a wonderful dignity. There is an interview with Kamandy on NPR.

The answer is Thelma Schoonmaker, the editor of such Martin Scorsese triumphs as Raging Bull (for which she won an Oscar) and Goodfellas. Schoonmaker was interviewed on Fresh Air, on May 31. A good interview not only for filmmakers, but also for those who love films, especially fans of Raging Bull.

The Terrorism Research Center has put the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh on its list of foreign terrorists. The Times of India reports:

The 38 shortlisted to give the Sangh company include jihadi biggies like Lashkar-e-Toiba and Hizbul Mujahideen which have been declared Foreign Terrorist Organisations by the US.

This listing has been around since September of last year, so its nothing new. The RSS is not alone:

The RSS might find some solace from an interesting inclusion—the Osho cult is also on the list. It is the first time that the Oshoites, known for their controversial views, have been accused of terrorism.

I had thought the RSS was more fascist than terrorist. Second, aren’t terrorists non-State actors? and the RSS has state support, more so during the BJP reign, but very palpably present.