“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.

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.

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.