King Khan in Lima

My Name is Khan (MNIK) is one of the worst movies I’ve seen this year. The embarrassing sentimentality of its scenes, which promote a cheesy, highly simplistic race-and-religion-transcending solidarity, make it unwatchable in parts. Bollywood’s alpha males – the Khans and the Roshans – are no longer overtly alpha-male, but they still are superhuman in other ways: they deliver babies using vacuum cleaners (3 Idiots); they invent new devices and fix just about anything (3 Idiots and MNIK); and most importantly, they live the most ideal and moral lives, are tremendously compassionate, follow their own unique visions, and deliver telling truths.

What else is this if not poorly concealed narcissism?

But my post isn’t supposed to be a rant on the modern day Indian superhero. Rather, it’s a rambling account on how I came to know of the popularity of a certain Khan in an unlikely city: Lima, Peru. This shouldn’t surprise us, given how interconnected the world is today. In fact, most Africans and Central Asians I’ve spoken to are decently well versed with Bollywood.

And yet Lima? The Latin American capital is halfway across the world from India; besides Peruvians have as little clue about Indians as Indians about Peruvians. Still, Shahrukh has succeeded in establishing himself there, to the same extent that Machu Pichu – that most iconic and magical of archaeological sites – has succeeded in becoming a much sought after destination for Indians with money (when I landed in Lima, prominent among the names displayed on cutouts by the receiving parties at the airport, were “Mukherjee” and “Patel”).

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Once, during a bus ride in Lima, I was seated across from the driver. He was a cheerful man. When he learned where I was from, he looked at me with a sort of awe that can only come from having discovered something immeasurably exotic. He announced my nationality a few times to the ticket collector, who wasn’t impressed. After we’d got past discussing Taj Mahal, he settled on Shahrukh Khan, with whom he was clearly besotted. Unfortunately, I was reduced to speaking in gestures and nodding sagely though I understood very little of what he was saying.
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At a Peruvian-owned DVD shop a few blocks away from downtown Lima, near the Rimac river, I found an entire section dedicated to Bollywood. There was a massive poster of Jodhaa Akbar, with Hrithik and Aishwarya prominent. But if you look closely, a Khan poster lurks behind to the right, sidelined and only partly visible.

But Khan shouldn't feel slighted, for the most artistic of tributes to him in Lima comes from this illustrator, whom I found busy at work in a street not far from the DVD shop.

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Just when Shahrukh seemed undisputed king in Lima, I learned that the immensely popular Thalaivar, who drives Tamil fans wild, has actually graced the land of the Incas for a song shoot at Machu Pichu in the Andean highlands (picture credits here). As can be seen, we have a feathered Aishwarya hopping with a bearded and macho looking Rajnikant. If the extras were local, then it follows that the Indians of India must have danced with the Indians of Peru.

I am sure the spirits of the dead Incas must have doubled in laughter upon watching this: “So these are the people we were mistaken for?”
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Update: There is even a fan page on Facebook, called Bollywood Peru.

Dil to Bachcha Hai Ji

For me, the most delightful moment in the new movie Ishqiya is the scene that goes with the melodious Dil To Bachcha Hai Ji – crudely “The heart is a child after all”. That translation doesn’t do the song justice but it does convey something elemental: we may age but we can be occasionally possessed of a carefree happiness that makes us young again.



Khalujan, the character that Naseruddin Shah plays, is in his late forties, or early fifties – it’s a testament to the actor’s versatility that in Firaaq he plays, and looks, a much older man. He is old in Ishqiya too; his beard is mostly gray. But as soon as he meets Krishna (Vidya Balan), the beautiful, alluring widow some twenty years his junior, he colors his beard black. And with the knowledge that he is falling in love, a kind of babyish joy suffuses his face.

Dil To Bachcha Hai Ji plays when Khalujan is standing in a crowded bus. A woman seated by the window looks at him adoringly; the man next to her notices this and offers Khalujan his seat. Khalujan, flattered by the woman’s glances – and she too, like Krishna, is young – refuses politely, but the woman continues look at him. He finally relents and takes the seat. Later, asleep, he leans his head unknowingly against the woman’s shoulder, and dreams of Krishna with contentment, the lilting melody of the song in the background. He is woken suddenly by the laughter of the other women in the bus and smiles sheepishly -- they are laughing at him. “Is umar mein ab khaogey dhoke” – the song goes at one point (“disappointments await you at this age” in my unsubtle translation).

It’s a brilliant scene in which Khalujan’s charm, joy and vulnerability all come together.

The song is Vishal Bharadwaj’s composition, and is sung by Rahat Fateh Ali Khan; the sublime lyrics are Gulzar’s. The tune plays in the style of old Hindi songs, but to accompaniment of Latin beats and strumming; there's an Arabic interlude as well. It’s an exquisite blend – take a listen.

An earlier post about a song in a very different kind of movie, Om Shanti Om.

Markets in two contexts

1.

The two stories I’ll be linking to in this post have something in common: the attempt to use “markets” to solve big problems. First, PBS Wide Angle profiles the Ethiopian economist Eleni Gabre-Madhin, who recently returned, after a long stint with the World Bank, to her home country to start a commodities exchange. The exchange’s principal focus is to trade grain – sesame, the all-important teff, maize and the like – in an efficient, transparent way. Whether such an idea will work is another question – and the documentary portrays well the immense challenges she faces.

What fascinated me most was that Eleni, in the years she was conducting academic research, tried her best to “follow the trail of grain”. That meant literally starting with the small farmer with the two acre plot who produces the crop, then moving to warehouses, the middlemen and traders, and finally to the actual markets. The lack of information along this chain and the fluctuations of supply and demand can cause wild price variations, which cripples small farmers. One such farmer in the documentary – a quiet, dignified man with a small plot that is in risk of failing this season because of drought – asks poignantly (I am paraphrasing here):

“Why is there variation in prices? Is there not a standard stable way of doing things? If there is a solution, I would like to know about it.”

The bigger context is Ethiopia’s famines: Eleni claims that it is the ideal of elimination of hunger that inspires her. In 1984, the year when famine took a terrible toll in one part of Ethiopia, a surplus existed in the southwestern part. If Eleni is successful -- and that's a big "if" -- her commodities exchange will become the standard way to trade grain throughout Ethiopia; it will ensure the quick transmission of price and quantity information, provide a regulated environment in which the shortages and surpluses cancel out, thus averting the possibility of famines.

2.

An inversion of the shortages-canceling-surpluses concept recurs in another commodities exchange. And this is an unusual one: the carbon market. Here surpluses are excesses in greenhouse gas emissions (and hence a bad thing); the shortages are efforts or the promise of reduced emissions (hence good). The UN regulated market under which this system operates is called cap and trade, a result of the Kyoto Protocol of 1997. The EU and other developed countries – except the United States – are now part of it. In the US, cap and trade legislation is still under debate.

Trading in carbon is big business now: it’s the fastest growing commodity exchange market, already worth 150 billion dollars. The idea is simple: Companies whose emissions exceed a predetermined limit or cap can offset their excesses by purchasing carbon credits from other companies that are below the limit. Or, they can do it by investing in wind farms or biofuels or similar efforts which hold the promise of reducing emissions. These credits or carbon offsets, many of which are from the developing world – the developing world sees an economic opportunity in the rich world’s emissions – are often bundled together and sold in exchanges. This is fueling a "carbon boom" – which, of course, will end suddenly sometime, because it’s hard to measure what is being sold: measurement varies across the world, and the actual impact on emissions cannot be determined with any certainty.

You would think one clear-cut way of earning carbon credits is to avoid deforestation. Preserve a forested region full of trees that store carbon and you gain as many credits as the carbon estimated to be stored in the trees. Each tree has a price in other words (journalist Mark Schapiro is shown a tree that is worth a dollar because it contains an estimated hundred kilograms of carbon). With this in mind, General Motors, American Electric Power and Chevron chose to preserve huge tracts of relatively pristine land in the Cachoeira reserve in the Brazilian state of Paraná. They brokered a deal through Nature Conservancy and the local SVPS (Society for Wildlife Research and Environmental Education). Though the US is not part of the cap and trade system, these corporations presumably estimated that they would eventually earn from these credits, in addition to boosting their reputations as champions of preservation.

Avoiding deforestation, however, does not have a clear cut case for reducing emissions -- indeed the UN has disallowed this option. There’s the chance that the deforestation simply shifts to unprotected areas, creating no overall emissions reduction. And more fundamentally, as Mark Shapiro reports in an essay in Mother Jones,

"when companies create reserves on already forested lands, their contribution to the fight against climate change is limited: "Do they get the credit for simply enhancing what was there already?" José Miguez, one of Brazil's top climate officials, told me that during the Kyoto talks his government opposed using its forests to enable northern industries to pollute more. "The forest is there," he said. "You can't guarantee it will absorb extra carbon. The General Motors plan gives a false image to the public in the United States. For us, they are pretending to combat climate change."

In the short yet revealing PBS Frontline World documentary, Brazil: The Money Tree, Shapiro reveals a deeper problem: what of the people who have been living in these forests and using its products? The commodification of trees by big corporations in the name of preservation has resulted in the use of coercive techniques – arrests and even armed patrols – to keep people, whose livelihood depends on the products they obtain from the preserved lands, off limits. This even in cases where the activities are not destructive to the forest’s existence.

Bring money into the picture and all sorts of conundrums pop up – even when the price tag is on something seemingly as innocuous as keeping a tree standing.

Frontline: A Death in Tehran

The death in question is of the young Neda Agha Sultan, who was out on the streets of Tehran protesting, after the controversial election election results in June this year. She was shot -- probably by a basij. Frontline provides some perspective of the events -- including footage collected from camera phones and camcorders -- leading to the shooting.

Still searching for: Dinner With The President

In June 2007, I saw a preview of Dinner With The President, a documentary about democracy in Pakistan. I’ve been looking for the movie ever since but have not been able to find it. In the meantime, all the teaser clips that I see of the movie only make me long for it more. In the two years that have passed, much has happened in Pakistan: the President of the documentary’s title is no longer the President; a political icon has been assassinated; and the Pakistani Taliban are posing a serious challenge. Yet, my sense is that Dinner With The President still remains relevant.

The President of the title is of course Pervez Musharraf. Musharraf surprisingly agreed to a dinner interview with Sabiha Sumar, one of the makers of the documentary. But Musharraf is not the only person Sabiha interviews. She talks to the young and the elite; she travels to a tribal area presumably in Pakistan’s west or northwest and talks to elders. The latter meeting is particularly tense. There is not one other woman at this gathering. Undaunted, Sabiha asks questions that make all the assembled men squirm. What does democracy mean to them? Why do they insist on strict interpretations of the Quran? Where does it say in the Quran that women are supposed to wear head scarves?

The responses is not all uniform. There are few dissenting men who seem to be against the intransigence of some of the elders. At the end, Sabiha's questions become so disconcerting to the assembled group, some men walk out, while others stay and talk to her.

The full clip of this interaction – a must-see in my opinion – is here.

Links

1. I've always put in a good word for the documentaries of Frontline, but now I've found another terrific source. This too a PBS production; it's called Wide Angle. The two documentaries I would especially recommend: Brazil in Black and White, which follows several Brazilian kids trying to get into college, and the effect of a recently implemented affirmative action policy. And Back to School - this one is an all time favorite - follows six children (one each in Kenya, Benin, India (in Rajasthan), Japan, Romania and Brazil and Afghanistan), trying to attend primary school, and the challenges they face.

2. Confessions of a xenophile: Amitav Ghosh writes in this contemplative essay about his early experiences in the village of Lataifa in Egypt, which led to one of his best books, In an antique land. Ghosh ties his time in Egypt to something broader: a yearning for universalism. Some excerpts:

The world today is very different from that of 1980, when I came to Egypt. The conversations and exchanges that re-commenced in the post-war period are now in danger of being broken off again. Today, especially in the Anglo-American world, capitalism and empire are once again being packaged together, in a bundle that is scarcely distinguishable from the old ‘civilizing mission’. Indeed, one of the outcomes of the horrifying attacks of 9/11 was that it led to an extraordinary rehabilitation of imperialism, not merely as a political and military force, but also as an ideology – one that has led to the unfolding catastrophe in Iraq.

[....]

Against this background it is tempting to look back on the days of non-alignment with some nostalgia: and indeed there was much that was valuable in that period. Yet it would be idle to pretend that solutions could be found by looking backwards in time. That was a certain historical moment and it has passed. If I have reflected on it here, it is not in order to suggest that we should try to turn back the clock – as religious fundamentalists seek to do – nor in order to fall back on an ideology of permanent victimhood such as that which the French rightly castigate as ‘tiers-mondisme’. I have pointed to that period, rather, in order to evoke the desires and hopes that animated it, in particular to its strain of xenophilia, to its yearning for a certain kind of universalism – not a universalism merely of principles and philosophy, but one of face-to-face encounters, of everyday experience. Except that this time we must correct the mistake that lay at the heart of that older anti-colonial impulse – which is that we must not only include the West within this spectrum of desire, we must also acknowledge that both the West and we ourselves have been irreversibly changed by our encounter with each other. We must recognize that in the West, as in Asia, Africa and elsewhere, there are great numbers of people who, by force of circumstance, have become xenophiles, in the deepest sense, of acknowledging that in matters of language, culture and civilization, their heritage, like ours, is fragmented, fissured and incomplete. Only when our work begins to embody the conflicts, the pain, the laughter, and the yearning that comes from this incompleteness will our work be a true mirror of the world we live in.

Frontline: The Choice and Heat

Once again, PBS Frontline excels with its superb documentaries. A couple of recent ones: The Choice, a deep analysis of the political backgrounds of John McCain and Barack Obama; and Heat, about the politics of global warming and the role of corporations. I've felt often that Frontline makes the best documentaries in the world. Check also: Frontline World, which brings us glimpses from around the world. And they are all available online - such high quality material, free!

A scene from Om Shanti Om

I found Om Shanti Om immensely entertaining. The movie was needlessly long and wallowed in precisely the sort of mushy, sentimental stuff it was trying to parody, but despite all its obvious drawbacks, it was a joy to watch – the songs and the comedy bits were wonderful.

There’s one particular scene I’ll remember and cherish for long. I’ve watched it a couple of times since, but the effect when I saw it on the big screen here in Rochester last November (yes, even this small, unheard-of Minnesota town screens Bollywood films) remains unsurpassed.

Some background: Om (Sharukh Khan) is a junior artiste in the 70s, hoping to make it big in Bollywood. He has an overpowering infatuation for Shantipriya (Deepika Padukone), the most popular actress of the time. Despite being only a chota-mota artiste Om believes, true filmi style, that they are made for each other. His mother – the quintessential, melodramatic, weepy Bollywood mom – gives him a sacred red thread with a metal band, blessed by the Sai Baba at Shirdi. Om wears this on his wrist, and, as he discovers later, these blessings do indeed help twine him with Shantipriya.

Now to the actual scene. It's the premiere of Dreamy Girl, Shantipriya’s latest film. Crowds throng at the theater where a red carpet will be rolled for the entire cast. Om is in the crowd, straining to get a glimpse of the arriving stars. He’s wearing a tacky red and black checked suit, while the others in the crowd sport more identifiable 70s style clothing: colorful bell-bottomed pants and shirt collars as large as whale fins.



Then it happens. A large limousine stops in front of the theater, and Shantipriya steps out in a pink dress. She is strikingly beautiful. Her hair is done the way Asha Parekh used to have hers done – neatly bunched around the head, adorned with sparkling jewels. Also at this point, the camera shifts to slow motion, and the melodious Aankhon me teri begins. Om is astounded by Shantipriya’s beauty, and, like dozens of others in the crowd, tentatively raises his hand to wave at her. Shantipriya waves to the crowd, acknowledging their cheers, a radiant, disarming smile on her face.

As she passes Om, the red thread (or the metal band: doesn’t really matter) on Om’s wrist somehow gets entangled in Shantipriya’s pink pallu. He is propelled forward, his hand outstretched as it trails the pallu. A few steps later, Shantipriya, oblivious up to then, feels a tug, and looks back. Her expression is one of bewilderment, before she realizes what has happened. She then smiles a knowing, killer smile, disentangles the pallu from the thread. As the security guards drag Om away, his face is one of contentment – so happy is he at having met her in this fortuitous fashion that he closes his eyes in bliss and has one hand over his heart.

What’s so special about this? What makes it wonderful? Two things: First the song, Aankhon me teri, couldn’t have been more appropriate: it matches superbly with how the scene unfolds in slow motion, and Deepika Padukone’s beauty and expressions accentuate the effect (she is impressive in the movie, especially the first half).

The second reason pertains to why Bollywood movies are a treat to watch: we indulge in a suspension of disbelief, and can completely immerse ourselves in the sentiments and the romance. As I sat in the movie hall watching the scene, I felt this strongly. I could feel too a twitter of yearning in my own heart, and I realized that the cynicism and weariness that one gathers from life could not overwhelm that thrilling, romantic moment in the movie. And I thought: aren’t feelings like this the essence of entertainment?
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Other related posts: some extracts of a long Bollywood-like story I wrote a few years ago; and a post on Nigerian cinema, probably the most vibrant movie industry in the world after Bollywood and Hollywood, and which, not unsurprisingly, is called Nollywood.

Frontline - Bush's War

It’s been five years since the Iraq war, and a lot has been written about the subject. But if you want a comprehensive one-stop overview, beginning from when Iraq first appeared on the Bush agenda - believe it or not, the neoconservatives in Bush's circle brought it up in the days after 9/11 despite there being no reason to do so – to the back room dealings among the President’s closest advisers; from the facts that were manufactured to fit war policy, to the embarrassing lack of planning in Iraq after the invasion; for all this and lots more look no further than this superb, 4-hour documentary by Frontline called Bush’s War, recently aired on American Public Television. You’ll get to see interviews from many of the major players; you’ll learn of the intense tug of war between the two sparring camps: Colin Powell and the State Department people on one side; Cheney, Rumsfeld Wolfowitz, the neoconservatives, on the other. You’ll also get to know how flimsy the Iraq war planning effort was, how it was bungled badly.

Yes, the story is known, has been told before, but not on such an epic scale and not in such an accessible form. The entire show is available free online. Go watch and find out how those with power pull strings and deftly conduct their politics – it’s a fascinating look at the decision-makers of the Bush government.

On Nollywood

Click on the links below to see the videos on which this post is based: and Link 2. The picture to the left is of the famous Nigerian actress, Stephanie Okereke.

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I wrote here that the most vibrant movie industry after Hollywood and Bollywood is Nollywood, from Nigeria. Nigerian movies are not released in theaters but made directly available on DVDs, CDs and videos. As the most populous country in Africa (130 million), Nigeria provides a ripe market for Nollywood (it also has markets elsewhere in Africa and the diaspora). The industry is based in bustling Lagos, where there's a powerful actor’s guild with 5000 registered actors.

Nollywood’s settings are decidedly rudimentary, the special effects tacky and amateur, but that’s because the directors work on shoestring budgets and extremely short timelines (2-3 weeks for instance). They work despite choking traffic and noise on Lagos streets; bystanders are often brought in to do roles in impromptu fashion; and in one case a movie was shot in an actual hospital, with patients and hospital staff featuring in roles even as they went about their daily routines.

There is simply no time for elaborate sets: Nollywood directors and crews make do with what they can.

I saw two video documentaries (by Journeyman Pictures, links above) on YouTube recently that gave fairly decent overviews of Nollywood. The second video includes interviews with some successful directors, mainly Ralph Nwadike; an actor, Hank, whose I-am-a-big-man attitude, sports cars and fancy motorbikes reminded me of Salman Khan; Nollywood’s most popular actress and heart-throb, Stephanie Okereke; and a 25-year old director and scriptwriter, Chinny Ahaneku, on the sets of her historical movie, Deceit of the Gods, set in a precolonial Igbo village. (The Igbo are one of the major ethnic groups in Nigeria.)
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Let’s go on the set of Deceit of the Gods for a bit.

The movie is being shot in a village in Eastern Nigeria, with much effort expended on costumes and authenticity. The villain in movie is an evil priest who sacrifices children and twins; there is also an evil forest - readers of Chinua Achebe’s famous Things fall Apart will be familiar with these cultural aspects of precolonial Igbo society.

At some point in the story, a white priest needs to appear and introduce Christianity to the village. But the director, Chinny, has not planned for a white actor. In a hilarious moment that is representative of the spontaneity with which Nollywood movies are made, she requests a cameraman, Jacques, a white South African – in fact the only white person in the village at the time – with no acting experience to fill in the role.

“But I have never acted,” he protests.

“Acting starts in a day; everything starts in a day!” Chinny pleads.

Jacques agrees reluctantly. He slips into a “tight-fitting and excruciatingly hot white robe”. Chinny had planned a minor role for him, but, in yet another unplanned twist, Jacques becomes a major actor in the movie and has to act for two full days.

To the evil priest and king of the village, the colonial priest delivers such solemn sermons as: “Idol worship and human sacrifice is from the devil. But if you accept God Almighty, he will save from all Evil!”

The movie ends on a feel-good note. The evil heathen priest is driven away; the king and the villagers accept the word of God preached by the white priest and convert to Christianity. The villagers dance to celebrate this happy event. Chinny herself plays the king’s bride, bringing in the love angle. (Again video here.)

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I found the movie's main premise fascinating because its happy ending is diametrically opposed to the climax of Chinua Achebe's literary classic Things fall Apart. Achebe’s story too is about a precolonial Igbo village that has its own rules and hierarchy. It also has the same customs that seem strange today – such as sacrificing twins in the evil forest. Here too Christianity comes and declares that heathen ways should be given up. But the end result is not only an end to cruel customs, but also a complete breakdown of Igbo society. The ambivalence produced by the arrival of Christianity, and the collapse of Igbo society as it was then is at the heart of Things fall Apart; it takes up only a 30 odd pages, but Achebe does it brilliantly.

But in Nollywood, as in Bollywood, there has to be a clear resolution, the end has to be happy, and that’s why Deceit of the Gods ends in simplistic fashion, with villagers joyously converting. And why not? Who wants to see it end seriously?

Why Democracy?

While traveling in Washington DC for a few days last week, I attended an event at the National Archives, where short clips from different documentaries were shown. The theme was democracy and how people and cultures from different parts of the world interpret it. This is the website of the group that is organizing the documentary project - called Why Democracy? - and bringing it to fruition.

The clips I saw at the DC event were brilliant – I can’t wait for the release of these movies. Among the movies featured was Dinner with the President, an audacious and nuanced account of a Pakistani reporter's travels to different parts of her country. The reporter's goal is to get a sense of what people from all walks of life – including Musharraf, whom she meets at a dinner – feel about democracy and the current political situation. A preview of the movie is here.

Also in the collection is Iron Ladies of Liberia, about the new President of Liberia, Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, and her brave and intelligent mediation of political disputes; and Please Vote for Me, a hilarious yet disconcerting look at the election of a class monitor in a primary school in Wuhan, China. I was astonished by how expertly this movie (at least in the clip I saw) was able to encapsulate - through the actions of little kids! - the power play, corruption and grievances that entail the democratic process. It reminded me a bit of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.

Jhumpa Lahiri on the movie The Namesake

Jhumpa Lahiri, author of the The Namesake, talks about her feelings upon seeing Mira Nair's movie adaptation of her novel:

"I saw it for the first time privately in November 2005. I didn’t feel anxiety in the making of the film. I felt relaxed and curious. I was burning with curiosity as we were going to see the movie. I had no idea what to expect. I had seen shots and stills so I had a sense. But to see it, I was just overwhelmed and had a very emotional reaction. I didn’t cry when I watched it. I cried afterward. It was the totality of the movie.

One of the great gifts that Mira has given to me is, you know, when I write something, I give it everything that I can, but at the same time, I’m very removed from it, and when it’s done, it ceases to matter to me. I’ve never gone back to something I’ve written and been affected by it because by that point it’s so completely out of my system. I’m not going to go to my own writing to have those experiences, I’m going to go to others’ writing for those experiences.

So for the first time I was able to experience something I had written and have any reaction to it. It was the first time I saw something and it was her movie and it was different. But it was essentially something that I’d written that had percolated in me for years and years and had taken a long time to write and all that stuff and the characters and it was true enough to my book, and I saw it and I was moved."

Link through Amitava's blog. Also, Lahiri's Outlook interview is here.

The Lost Boys of Sudan

I

Lost Boys of Sudan is a documentary that follows the stories of two orphaned Sudanese refugee youth, Peter and Santino, from the time just before they left Sudan, to twelve months after their arrival in the United States. Both Peter and Santino, like many other young men and women, were orphaned by the protracted civil conflict in Sudan. The documentary presents selected day-to-day occurences (mostly in the United States) as they happened to Peter and Santino. The method is an effective one; it captures the refugee experience very well; and, judging from its reach and its popularity, the movie appears to have touched a chord in audiences all over the United States.

I saw the movie two years ago in Tempe, Arizona, at a local coffee shop. A refugee help group, consisting of mostly young volunteers, had organized the screening. The small room in which the movie was shown was packed. And at the end of the screening the audience could meet and talk to three Sudanese youth who had been through experiences similar to those shown in the movie, and were now refugees in the Phoenix area.

The Sudanese young men stood out in the crowd. They were thin and very black. It was one of things that Santino had talked about in the movie: his blackness and appearance set him apart from everyone, even African Americans. (In the movie, there are several pronouncements on African Americans: even before leaving Sudan, Peter and Santino are advised to avoid blacks who wear baggy pants and do “all the bad things in America”).

The Sudanese men were like celebrities that night at the coffee shop. But they took the attention very well; they seemed almost to bask in it. And for a moment – seeing their big smiles, hearing their confident answers to questions, hearing of their eagerness for education and degrees – it was easy to forget the tragedies and difficulties they had been through, and continue to go through: the loss of their parents, the break-up of their tribal communities, the uncertain political situation back home, and their solitude in America.

II

I somehow had the mistaken notion that there were different versions of the movie; I thought that each version would focus on a different set of Sudanese refugees. This was why I attended a screening of the movie at the public library, just two days ago, in Rochester, Minnesota. It was the same movie, but in other ways the experience was different.

At the screening, I met Gabriel, a Sudanese refugee - yet another of the many "lost boys", to use the movie's term, in the United States. I thought that Gabriel – and perhaps others who would shortly be there – had been invited to meet and discuss with the audience, just as at the Tempe screening. But it wasn’t so. Gabriel was the only Sudanese refugee at the library that night. He had come with a notebook; he had come because the instructor of one of the classes he was taking at the local college had asked him to attend the screening. In a way, it was ironic: Gabriel would see in the movie what he knew very well; and even without seeing it he could probably have written just as vivid an account.

Gabriel too was lean and very black. He was dressed plainly in dark pants and a striped, full-sleeve shirt that he hadn’t tucked in; he wore white sneakers. And because he was shy and reserved, he seemed to be quietly carrying the grief of his past within him.

Gabriel hadn’t seen the movie but he knew some of the refugees in the movie; he had come to the US with them at the same time, just a week before Sept 11, in 2001. At a couple of points during the screening, he turned to tell me (I was seated next to him) of the people he recognized in the movie. Some of the scenes – such as the singing of Sudanese songs and slogans of liberation; the dances of the villagers; the reunion of the lost boys at a retreat in Washington a year after their arrival, a retreat that Gabriel had been unable to attend – some of these scenes would have been powerfully nostalgic and painful to him. And I felt it was just as well that he had an assignment to finish that night and could not attend the post-screening discussion: it might have been awkward for him; all the politeness and empathy around him might have made him very conscious.

This Summer on PBS

A Frontline four-part series on AIDS. The preview calls it "The most important scientific and political story of our time". With 70 million infected and 22 million already dead – these are staggering numbers – there can hardly be any doubt. The series (240 minutes in all) examines all aspects of the disease: political, scientific and human.

Unrelated to this, I also found on the Frontline website a documentary, Bolivia: On the Road with Evo, that tries to understand Bolivia’s new leader Evo Morales –the country's first indigenous president – and his left-leaning policies. The 24 minute film is part of Frontline World's Stories from a Small Planet series.

The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature and Premchand's Shatranj ke Khiladi

The last time I checked on Amazon, no one had reviewed The Picador Book of Modern Indian Literature. But that may be because the book is a difficult read, because in its six hundred or so pages the editor Amit Chaudhri anthologizes all the major writing in India in the last century and a half. Amit Chaudhri’s effort is nothing short of astonishing; he must have read through hundreds of translations from the multitude of Indian languages to assemble such a wide-ranging anthology as this. The collection is more meticulous and well researched than Salman Rushdie’s Mirrorwork, which proclaims that the best Indian writing since independence has been in English. Certainly, a lot of good writing has been in English, but the vernacular was and still remains a powerful medium for creative expression.

(In May 1999, the literary critic Pankaj Mishra in an article for the New York Review of Books wrote that despite the success of Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things, which sold 100,00o copies, the market for Indian writing in English in India hasn’t really opened up (as opposed to the West where there seems to be a significant audience for Indian writing). For instance, Amit Chaudhri’s novel, Freedom Song sold a modest 4000 copies in India while literary novels in Malayalam or Marathi sell tens of thousands of copies. )

I was leafing through Chaudhri’s anthology, and in the section on Hindi I saw a short story by Premchand. The Chess Players was written in 1924 but is set in a much earlier time. I read the first two sentences and felt a stab of nostalgic yearning for the Hindi stories that I had read in high school. For years now I haven’t read even a page in Hindi and I have to labor through a paragraph when I see one. As I read more of the Premchand story, I wished I had a copy of it in Hindi with me, so I could be closer to the subtle rhythms of the language that Premchand must have used.

Mirza Sajjad Ali and Mir Raushan Ali are the chess players of the story, obsessed with the game. Indeed this is the story that Satyajit Ray used for his well-known Shatranj ke Khiladi. It is set in Lucknow of the mid nineteenth century when it was the principal city of the Awadh province, ruled by the Muslim king Wajid Ali Khan. The Lucknow that Premchand depicts in the story is in a sensual stupor, its residents far too busy in indulgent pursuits to be aware of the political ferment of the time.

Like others with their own preoccupations – reveling in opium induced ecstasy or betting on quail and partridge fights – Mirza Ali and Mir Ali too are absorbed in their long chess games every day. This goes on until domestic pestilences – such as Mirza Ali’s wife who disallows any chess games in the house – force them to escape one day to the desolate countryside where they play in an abandoned mosque. But that same day, the soldiers of the East India Company march through the countryside on their way to Lucknow. Curiously – and this is perhaps the central theme of the story: the extraordinary insouciance of the two players in face of all the tumult around them – the political maneuvering that will bring Lucknow under British control does not interest them, but the maneuvers on the chess board that shall affect no one do. So even as Wajid Ali Khan surrenders to the British army without so much as a whimper, the two chess players continue to fight a pitched battle. Such is the intensity of their game that they start a quarrel over their moves; they start to fight with their swords and slay each other.

The ending struck me as rather contrived and abrupt, out of step with the nuanced story, its irony, humor and well-thought out historical setting. In the movie, Ray presents a different, a more poignant climax: the two chess players do get to the point where they could have killed each other – in fact Mirza even fires a shot at Mir – but miraculously both survive uninjured. In the last few seconds of the movie, Mirza (played by Sanjeev Kumar) and Mir (played by Saeed Jaffrey) have expressions of deep disquiet, as the enormity of where the game of chess has led them slowly sinks in.