Kerim has a post on Savage Minds about the Gujjars and the recent violence in Rajasthan.

Escape Pod (a sci-fi podcast) is one of my reliable companions on long walks. A few weeks ago they had a story, Artifice and Intelligence, about a super intelligent entity called Saraswati and her human companion, Pramesh, a tech support guy somewhere in a bunker in Pondicherry. It was pretty good, though it didn’t live up to its promise-the characters were interesting, and by the time they were developed, the story was over. It didn’t really develop the social or psychological relationships between the characters, which good sci-fi seems to do economically and effectively, like the brilliant play, Harvest by Manjula Padmanabhan.

Its interesting to compare the two, since both the narratives involve First World and Third World characters, but the stakes are  much higher in ‘Harvest’ and there palpable sense of  power imbalances between the characters, which is missing in the artificial intelligence story. I guess its problem is that it just doesn’t seem to have that much to say. And no, it doesn’t have to be only about the Third World being exploited for its wombs or back office workers, it could be a Bollywood tech story like Transmission (which I enjoyed a great deal). Outsourcing is ripe for a ripping sci-fi story, so I am sure one will come along pretty soon, if it hasn’t already. Meanwhile, I continue to enjoy Escape Pod and its fine fare which makes my iPod, oh so worth having.

The Bloomberg administration has proposed easing the rules for independent filmmakers regarding permits to film in public spaces in New York City. :

The rules, to be released on Tuesday for public comment, would generally allow people using hand-held equipment, including tripods, to shoot for any length of time on sidewalks and in parks as long as they leave sufficient room for pedestrians.

This change of heart resulted from the lawsuit brought by the New York Civil Liberties Union on behalf of Rakesh Sharma in 2005:

The film office originally agreed to write the rules as part of a settlement in April of a lawsuit brought on behalf of Rakesh Sharma, a documentary filmmaker who was detained by the police in 2005 after using a hand-held video camera in Midtown. Told that he was required to have a permit to film on city property, Mr. Sharma later pursued a permit and discovered that there were no written guidelines on how they were granted, according to the lawsuit.

Hurray for the NYCLU, and the City.

An online exhibition and essay of poster art and popular film about Indian Muslims by filmmaker Yousuf Saeed.

This photo was in the Taipei Times today:

BRAKE DANCING
Volunteer traffic police integrate traffic direction gestures into a dance while performing in the “traffic dance” segment of the first national competition for applied police skills at Taiwan Police College in Taipei yesterday. (Photo by GEORGE TSORNG)

I don’t even know where to begin trying to parse this one.

The above is from Anu Matthew’s portfolio, “Bollywood Satirized.” Regarding which she says:

Bollywood Satirized, is a critical commentary on the societal expectations that I experienced as a woman growing up in India.

More images by the very versatile Annu Matthew on her website.

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

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.

Sabina England has an utterly delightful five minute play, Osama Doesn’t Care About White People. You can read other plays by this amazing playwright on her blog.

The knighthood of Salman Rushdie and the idiotic protest in Pakistan and Iran (see Amardeep) are two sides of the same coin, somewhat, read Priya Gopal on the subject:

To see the knighthood as “belated” endorsement by the British establishment is to miss the point entirely. Until, and even after, the vicious death sentence pronounced by Ayatollah Khomeini, Rushdie could not possibly have been endorsed by an establishment he had committed himself to undermining in merciless prose and brilliant satire.