I am sure everyone has seen this NYT article on MIA by now.

Theresa Thanjan and I produced the following PSA for the Dream Act. The music, Star Mangled Banner was composed by John Plenge.

Whose Children Are These? provides a gripping view into the lives of three Muslim teenagers impacted by anti-terrorism national security measures. One such program, “Special Registration,” required male non-citizens, as young as 16 from 25 predominately Arab and Muslim nations, to register with the US Government and resulted in the discriminatory deportation of nearly 14,000 men.

The film introduces Navila, an honors student who fought to have her father released from detention; Sarfaraz, a popular basketball player who confronts pending deportation; and Hager, a young woman who faces bias and is spurred into activism as a result.

I edited this award winning doc which has won seven awards and still counting. It got finishing funds from the Corporation of Public Broadcasting, and is now being offered to Public broadcasting affiliates at the end of August. It needs letters of support in order to be programmed. So if you are in the US, please write to your local PBS station by clicking on the following link:

http://www.whosechildrenarethese.com/outreach.html

And forward the information to your friends and networks. Hopefully lots of people will get a chance to see this important documentary.

See Dilip D’Souza’s post on the latest attack on Taslima Nasrin. As usual “religious sentiments have been hurt” is being handed out as so much stale mithai, and as Dilip points out, it has an eery resemblance to recent events in Baroda. This shameful episode is rightly being condemned widely, however, with certain qualifiers:

“The government should immediately cancel her visa and make her go out of the country,” he said adding, “she should realise that this is not Bangladesh or Pakistan, but India where the sentiments of all communities are respected”.(Delhi Minorities Commission Chairperson Kamal Farooqui)

And further:

No doubt Taslima Nasrin’s penchant to flirt with the religious sentiment of the Islamic community and her outright defense of right to indulge in sex outside marriage is not less outrageous as such ideas in print form only contribute to pollute the purity of the general mind to a larger extent.

Taslima Nasrin makes everybody uncomfortable. There are those who are complaining that “secularists have double standards because they are not doing dharnas.” Which, as Amardeep points out doesn’t seem to be completely true. And others who are annoyed with her because it makes Muslims look bad in the eyes of the West (look what you are making the crazy mullahs do, stop writing this sh!t already) because:

If Taslima is all about this major literary voice being stilled, why is it that very little analysis is being done of her writings? Why is she always in the news for a perspective other than one of literary or ethical significance? Even when she wrote an autobiographical account in which several writers and political figures were mentioned, not for their role in damaging society but for sleeping with her, she was harping on freedom of speech.

A former professor, Shohini Ghosh, has an article, Censorship Myths and Imagined Harms (its a pdf download) in the Sarai Reader. The article was written in response to the West Bengal Government’s ban on Nasrin’s autobiography in 2003, and is about the “critical overlap between hate speech and sexual speech.” She points out how Taslima’s writing are neither “traditionally feminine nor desirable by Bengali canonical standards.” And how, “too much sexual agency deserves to be punished.” It points out how sexual stigma is used in hate campaigns. It leaves one with a chilling sense of the implications of these various forms of moral policing that are being advocated.

Our short doc will be at the One Billion Eyes Indian Documentary Film Festival, on 16th August at 5 pm. Budhan Theatre will be performing their latest production, Choli ke Pichhe, an adaptation of Mahasweta Devi’s Stanadayani. Its a pretty remarkable piece of theatre. It will be performed on the 18th, at 8 pm.

Prakriti Foundation
In association with The Alliance Francaise, Chennai
presents
One Billion Eyes Indian Documentary Film Festival – 2007
August 15 – 19, 2007
Venue : The Alliance Francaise, Chennai

The entire festival has several films I’d like to see. Too bad we can’t attend.

Ennis has a very good post on the floods in South Asia. He points out that the floods have displaced nineteen times as many people as Katrina. For donations to India, go through AID’s All India Relief Fund, I prefer them to the Red Cross, as more of the money will get to the victims (besides India has refused foreign aid). For Bangladesh see this post by Mash (via Globalvoices).

My copy of Anupama Chopra’s King of Bollywood: Shah Rukh Khan and the Seductive World of Indian Cinema finally arrived from the village post office. Amardeep has a great review and Filmiholic has a group interview with the author. Culled from thirty hours of interviews with Shah Rukh and interviews with eighty other people, the book is a very readable account of Shah Rukh’s rise to stardom. I particularly enjoyed the skill with which Anupama Chopra works in the history of the Hindi film industry and how it functions in order to allow for the SRK phenomenon. As she says:

I hope that I’ve managed to create a picture of Bollywood with Shah Rukh in the foreground and many, many other things in the background. The ambition was to create a window to a superstar’s life, Bollywood and India.

It keeps the book from becoming a hagiography, despite the obvious affection the author feels for her subject.

The book briefly mentions the year Shah Rukh spent as a student at the Mass Communication Research Center, in Jamia Millia Islamia, where he was a class mate of mine. This is one of those things that gives me mucho cool points with my nieces and nephews. Unfortunately he was not allowed to continue in the Masters program because of low attendance. In that year we were in the same project groups, and even then Shah Rukh was very charismatic and completely confident about his success. The boys in my class all made fun of his acting ability and looks, I guess all those jokes have backfired, big time.

One of my most vivid memories is of a time when we had just started in the Masters program, we were sitting on the lawn, while the other students were milling about, Shah Rukh looked at each of our classmates and with great accuracy described what everybody’s greatest fears and hopes were. Years later, I think of that conversation as being uncannily prescient. Shah Rukh was extremely intelligent and could read people with a frightening accuracy. I suppose that is one his greatest skills, the ability to recognize who a person is and how to negotiate with them.

The book’s account of his life while being vivid and detailed is very aligned to the persona of its subject, almost unconsciously so. I very clearly remember Shah Rukh talking about going to Bombay to do mainstream films, it wasn’t some after thought subsequent to doing “high-brow” theatre (was English theatre in Delhi high-brow is for another blog post) but perhaps Fellini like, the biographical narrative has acquired its own life. Certainly, his sense of himself as a movie star was pretty well formed even back then. Recently a friend reminded me how we were recruited to pass notes in History textbooks to his then girl friend, Gauri. Oh yes, it was all very filmy, and I was never certain how much of his persona was really him, and how much an image he had cultivated so vigorously that it became him. But no matter what, Shah Rukh was one of the nicest people in my class, and quite different from a lot of the boys who delighted in telling the women that they were stupid and incompetent. Not that he wasn’t sexist. I distinctly remember him telling me he didn’t want to work with Mira Nair because he thought he couldn’t learn anything from a woman director. Who knows what was behind that, but there it is. And oh yes, Pradeep Krishen and Arundhati Roy annoyed him exceedingly, and not just because of the role he didn’t get in Annie…but now I am descending into gossip, so I will stop.

The police in Thailand has decided to punish officers for minor offenses by making them wear a “Hello Kitty” armband:

“Simple warnings no longer work. This new twist is expected to make them feel guilt and shame and prevent them from repeating the offence, no matter how minor,” he (Police Colonel Pongpat Chayaphan) said.

“[Hello] Kitty is a cute icon for young girls. It’s not something macho police officers want covering their biceps.”

Out here in Taiwan, with its love for all things ‘ke-ai’ this would probably not be considered a punishment. I think all the 25,000 plus items that the Sanrio company sells do pretty well here, and have been since 1974 when they started. Personally I intend to get the pink Hello Kitty scooter myself. And in case you were wondering why Hello Kitty does not have a mouth, the company website says:

Hello Kitty speaks from her heart. She’s Sanrio’s ambassador to the world and isn’t bound to any particular language.

If you have been following the immigration debate, you might know that the DREAM Act is one of the provisions that applies to young people who came here with their parents. It essentially allows these kids to have a fair chance to compete with every one else for access to education and jobs.

My colleague Theresa Thanjan and I have made a music video for a song written by a couple of kids about the DREAM Act.

Some of the stories about these young people are just heartbreaking. This American Life has a story about one such girl who is struggling to get an education.

To get involved, get in touch with New York State Youth Leadership Council.