Sally Quinn in The Washington Post:

There is something unusually compelling about his combination of total coolness, gentle innocence and self-deprecating humor. At 46, he still has a child’s heart. At last year’s Brookings Institution conference on Muslim-American relations, in Doha, Qatar, he sort of owned the place: With every appearance, he was immediately surrounded by admiring wonks, wanting to bask in his aura of peaceful energy. There is even a healing quality about him. Perhaps it’s because he has just been dowsed.

Samina, Ahmad’s wife, whom he met and fell in love with at age 17, is a holistic health counselor. Both are, in fact, physicians--though he had always wanted to be a musician, his parents persuaded him to become a doctor. She’s also accomplished in the kitchen and for six years had her own cooking show on television. She was, he says, the Martha Stewart of Pakistan. Samina recently learned to dowse, which is done with a pendulum-like mechanism. “It’s like prayer,” he says. “It uses positive energy from the universe. It’s not distant from the Muslim tradition.”

“I know,” he says with a laugh, “that it sounds like hocus-pocus, and I was skeptical at first. It’s like a spiritual ouija board. It raises people’s energies.” He says it’s certainly hard to describe, and that it’s not like the divining rods that westerners used to find water. His wife started dowsing him in June, and when she does, he recites a Muslim prayer: I seek refuge in the Lord of Daybreak. He focuses on a specific issue that may be bothering him, making him melancholy or anxious. “It’s a cathartic process,” he explains. “Through prayer and talking, you lift yourself out of it.” More:

Vindi Banga and Ajay Banga

They are both Indian-born, both called Banga, they both climbed the ladder of western corporate capitalism and they have both been denied (so far) a foothold on the highest rung. Vindi Banga, a top executive director of Unilever, yesterday followed his younger brother in quitting a multinational after failing to land the chief executive’s job.

Ajay Banga left Citigroup for Mastercard last summer after being pipped to the top post by his compatriot Vikram Pandit.

Now Vindi has jumped ship at the consumer goods giant 15 months after the appointment of Paul Polman as chief executive. His departure will spark speculation about his next job and he suggested yesterday that there could be news in a couple of months.

He is tipped as a contender at Tata Group, the giant Indian conglomerate where the chairman, Ratan Tata, 72, is looking for a successor. But people close to Mr Banga suggested yesterday he is not pursuing this. More:

My heart is very much in India: Manvinder Singh ‘Vindi’ Banga

and here

Sceptic challenges guru to kill him live on TV. Jeremy Page in The Times:

When a famous tantric guru boasted on television that he could kill another man using only his mystical powers, most viewers either gasped in awe or merely nodded unquestioningly. Sanal Edamaruku’s response was different. “Go on then — kill me,” he said.

Mr Edamaruku had been invited to the same talk show as head of the Indian Rationalists’ Association — the country’s self-appointed sceptic-in-chief. At first the holy man, Pandit Surender Sharma, was reluctant, but eventually he agreed to perform a series of rituals designed to kill Mr Edamaruku live on television. Millions tuned in as the channel cancelled scheduled programming to continue broadcasting the showdown, which can still be viewed on YouTube.

First, the master chanted mantras, then he sprinkled water on his intended victim. He brandished a knife, ruffled the sceptic’s hair and pressed his temples. But after several hours of similar antics, Mr Edamaruku was still very much alive — smiling for the cameras and taunting the furious holy man. More:

via Our Delhi Struggle

The southern swath of Baluchistan is anything but godforsaken. It is, I learn, hallowed land: When Kali, the Dark Mother of the Hindu religion, the Goddess of Death, shattered millennia ago, her torso landed in the mountains.

Baluchistan, then, is not simply hallowed; it is one of the holiest tracts in Hindu mythology. Several years ago, L.K. Adavni, then-leader of the Hindu fundamentalist party in India, was stirred when he visited Nani Mandir. (On his return, he was temporarily dismissed from the party because of “pro-Pakistan” statements he made to the press.) Asphalt roads were paved in anticipation of his advent.

The approach to the temple is unremarkable: An iron gate opens into a narrow esplanade nestled in a valley, presumably a riverbed in the rainy season. Simple single-story cement rooms stand on either side. A makeshift cupboard-sized shrine houses a statuette of Kali, arms perpendicularly extended, tongue rolled out like Gene Simmons. Burnt incense sticks are pitched in the surrounding earth and empty coconut husks litter the periphery. In April, thousands of Hindu pilgrims, both local and from across the border, make the journey on foot. They shave their hair and shed their clothes. We follow in their tracks, passing mossy pools littered with Frooto boxes and floating locks. There is graffiti in Sanskrit on the boulders, and a pair of vertiginous eyes.

Unlike the temples in and around Karachi — Sri Swami Narayan on Bandar Road, Ratneshwar Mahadev in Clifton — Nani Mandir is not grand; there are no spires, arches, no detailed stonework. More:

Ashis Nandy and Gurcharan Das discuss the Mahabharata (in three parts: part 1, part 2, part 3; total ~25 mins). Via Shunya’s Notes

Some thirty-five years ago[1], the Indian publishing firm of Bennett and Coleman introduced the Phantom comic books that would fill the misspent afternoons of my boyhood. The first four frames were usually given over to the terse phrases and fragments of the perennial recap that was soon consigned to memory as I raced wide-eyed through my purple-clad hero’s latest adventures: thwarting gangsters, rescuing women, keeping the jungles of Africa safe.

It was a quieter, gentler time. I lived in a somnolent neighbourhood of Delhi called Bengali Market (after its largest establishment, Bhimsen’s Bengal Sweets). My father drove home at noon on weekdays for a lunchtime siesta. And my friends and I belonged to a cargo cult.

Those were the days of import substitution. The products of phoren that washed up on our shores were worshiped as much for their packaging as their contents, and we sniffed the suitcases of foreign-returned relatives like shipwrecked enologists. The material culture of middle-class Indians was built on a modest range of overseas products that had been marooned and indigenised as the government’s import restrictions took hold. A car was an Amby—the Ambassador, a 1950s Morris Oxford replicated by Hindustan Motors; a television was a black-and-white Telerad of East German design; a camera was an Agfa Isoly; a chocolate was a Cadbury’s Dairy Milk. As for fizzy drinks, well, Coke was it (though even that would be banned in 1977, to be replaced by the state-sponsored Double Seven).

And a comic book was a Phantom.

more

More women are finishing college and getting jobs, and they have traded traditional baggy shalwars for trousers and capris. The city has been aggressively transformed by a mayor so impressively capable that he seems misplaced in a culture of corrupt politicians and broken bureaucracies.

If I sound like a wide-eyed Pakistani-American, it’s because I am. Pakistan today is more open and progressive than Pakistani communities in the United States. My parents’ generation in America has worked hard to preserve the Pakistan they left behind in the 1980’s.

Pakistani-Americans whisper and shake their heads about the wild parties they hear go on in Pakistan today. It’s true: alcohol, although illegal, is everywhere. And when I celebrated Christmas in Karachi this December, it was a Pakistani-American girl I met there who commented disapprovingly. Meanwhile, my Pakistani friends didn’t believe me when I tried to tell them that, having grown up in the United States, I have never met a Muslim who celebrated Christmas. More:

New Delhi: When Madan Lal began work here among the madness, color and chaos of the Janpath pavement, Richard Nixon was in the White House and there wasn’t a main street shop anywhere in the world selling computers.

At the age of 15 he sat down on the uneven concrete, in exactly the same place occupied by his father, and began shining the shoes of tourists and anyone else with the luxury of footwear to polish.

Behind him the rickshaws and hooting cars sped past, the world underwent cosmic change and 40 years on, with considerably fewer teeth, his hands engrained with shoe polish and a dirty yellow sweatband across his forehead, he’s still there.

But his is not a story of dire misfortune — at least in Indian terms. His daily income of around $4 puts him ahead of no less than several hundred million of his countrymen, he can buy medicine for his son with a heart condition. He has married off his daughters and can afford to feed himself and his wife. More:

The social-networking giant has opened its first-ever office in Asia—in the country where being all up in one another’s business is practically a birthright.

Facebook and Indians have a magnetic connection. Everyone in my family in India except my father—who, at 77, is entitled to his suspicions of the medium—is a Facebook user. Every single friend of mine in India—except for an eccentric Bengali writer who idolizes a 19th-century British viceroy, Lord Curzon, for which reason he cannot be said to have come to terms with the modern world—is a Facebook user.

Every single friend of mine of Indian origin, anywhere in the world, is a Facebook user. And a great number of my Facebook “friends” are Indians who, having read my journalism, or seen my name on a sibling’s or (genuine) friend’s page, have sought me out and “friended” me as a reflexive act of connection; and being of Indian origin myself, I’ve always found it infernally hard—if not virtually impossible—to say “no.” More:

From The Indian Express: “While vowing to stay away from elections himself, the guru said he would make sure that his proposed political party would have at least seven lakh members in each constituency.

“I have been working for this for the past 20 years. Over the past two years, I have met nearly three crore people in Hardwar, trained and mobilised thousands of people in 60 districts. I want to use black money for the good of the country, ensure that offences like corruption and terrorism get the capital punishment, and turn the political system towards the policy of Swadeshi. This is not a knee-jerk decision,” he said.

Previously in AW:

• Baba Ramdev: guru, TV star and source of controversy
• On a Scottish island bought as a birthday gift, Baba Ramdev sets up base
• TV swami offers a cure for all ills

From TED Talks: Neuroscientist Vilayanur Ramachandran outlines the fascinating functions of mirror neurons. Only recently discovered, these neurons allow us to learn complex social behaviors, some of which formed the foundations of human civilization as we know it.

In my six years there, it was hard not to be infected by the hubris of India – a nation that feels part of history, an essential actor on the global stage. Yet even as I admired a country that had thrived as a democracy despite unbounded poverty, mass illiteracy and entrenched social divides, experiencing India as a reporter was a string of enervating and dispiriting episodes.

Whether I was visiting a rural police station where half-naked men were hung from the ceiling during an interrogation, or talking to the parents of a baby bulldozed to death in a slum clearance, the romance of India’s idealism was undone by its awful daily reality. The venality, mediocrity and indiscipline of its ruling class would be comical but for the fact that politicians appeared incapable of doing anything for the 836 million people who live on 25p a day.

The selling of public office for private gain was so bad that the only way to make poverty history in India would be to make every person a politician. Last year the wealth of local representatives in the northern state of Haryana rose at an astonishing rate of £10,000 a month. Their constituents were lucky if their income increased by a few pounds. More:

In fact, Taseer’s novel is the more fully realised of the two. We follow our narrator, also called Aatish, and also returning to Delhi after years abroad, as he befriends a brash, ambitious personal trainer called Aakash, and charts a course through the new social highs and lows of his home city.

Plot comes by way of a murder, in which Aakash is implicated; but Taseer is quick to point out that this novel’s real significance resides in what lies around the murder – that is, Delhi, in all its beauty and brutality – rather than in the murder tself.

There’s no doubt, says Taseer, that his own return to Delhi, and the shocks it gave rise to, were the fuel that powered his writing.

“Coming back to Delhi was arresting for me,” he says. “First, I realised that growing up in the city I had been blind to certain aspects of it, which I now saw: the dirt, the poverty, the casual violence built into relationships between privileged people and servants.

“But there was also shock at what was changing. It was a social change that was creating kinds of people who simply didn’t exist before. I grew up in India amid a class sealed away by the English language, by certain ideas of dress, and culture, and westernisation. And outside of that class were people who had very little. Now economic activity was changing that; you see all sorts of people developing their own ideas of vocation, and aspiration, and what should be theirs. More:

The latest survey, from December 2009, counted 265 pairs of twins in the village, which is home to about 3,000 families and 13,000 inhabitants. This equates to a twinning rate of about 30 to 35 per 1,000 live births within a radius of about 500 metres. The average in the rest of the country is 8.1 per 1,000 live births.

The anomaly has caused a sensation in research circles and generated enormous national and international media interest in Kodinji in the past two years.

The number of reporters and researchers arriving unannounced is growing, not always to the delight of the villagers. Tucked away in the lush green northern parts of Kerala, Kodinji is a small village in the Malappuram district. It is a quiet, unassuming village with the noticeable signs of Gulf money pouring in to sustain its people. Small billboards advertising abaya fashion dot the road leading to the village and large multi-storeyed houses with wild gardens of banana and coconut trees function as symbols of prosperity.

At the day-long camp, 175 pairs of twins from the village, dressed in their Sunday best, are examined by a team of doctors led by Dr Sribiju, a dermatologist and geriatrician, who goes by one name. The doctors measure the twins’ height and weight and note down the vitals of each participant. A dietician then interviews the twins and their parents for a nutritional assessment. One of the examiners, who prefers not to give their name, later says the preliminary observations did not indicate any outward abnormalities in the twins’ health and well-being.  More:

Ten of the 25 richest Asians are from India. Mukesh Ambani of India’s Reliance Group, with an estimate net worth of US$29 billion, is the richest, followed closely by steel giant Lakshmi Mittal (at USD28.7 billion).

Globally, Ambani and Mittal are the fourth and fifth richest – right behind Carlos Slim (USD 53.5 billion), Bill Gates ($53 billion) and Warren Buffet ($47 billion).

About Pakistan’s Mian Mohammad Mansha, Forbes says:

Born during the tumultuous Partition winter of 1947, when his parents were among those Muslim families making the trek from India to Pakistan. His father and uncles jumped into textiles with Nishat Mills in 1951. Mian went to college in the U.K.; joined family business after graduation…His Nishat Group is now Pakistan’s largest exporter of cotton clothes (for brands like Gap) and nation’s largest private employer. More:

Click here for the full Forbes list

Also see here and here

They would have called themselves Katis, but the Muslims surrounding them had for centuries called them Kafirs -- infidels -- and their land, thus came to be known as Kafiristan. C.M. Naim in Outlook:

My Heartrendingly Tragic Story By Shaikh Muhammad Abdullah Khan ‘Azar’. Edited By Alberto M. Cacopardo and Ruth Laila Schmidt. Oslo: Novus Press, 2006

One day in 1897, near the village Brumotul not far from Chitral, then a semi-independent Muslim state high in the Himalayas, a bunch of boys went walking. They were not Chitralis, but refugees from another place that lay west of the newly demarcated Durand Line. They were not Muslims, either. The boys would have described themselves as Katis, but the Muslims surrounding them had for centuries used “Kafir” to describe the boys’ ancestors, and “Kafiristan” for their original land. The British had retained that nomenclature for the portion of that land they now controlled, while the Afghan Amir, Abdur Rahman, whose invasion had made the boys refugees, had named his portion “Nuristan” (“The Land of Light”).

The boys stopped on a bridge to watch two “Sahibs” fishing in the stream below, not having seen their likes before. One of the sportsmen came over to them and said something in Khowar, one of the several languages spoken among the Kafirs. One Kati boy understood what was said; he asked his friends to find earthworms for the Sahib. Later, he and another boy carried the day’s catch to the Sahibs’ camp. The man who spoke to the boys was an army doctor named Capt; the Kati boy who understood him was named Azar. Something about the boy struck Harris as exceptional. He sent for him the following day and almost obsessively insisted that Azar—barely ten or eleven at the time—should join his service. Azar offered excuses, his mother cried, but his father, Kashmir, the leader of the clan, gave his permission. Azar became Harris’s servant—first for 18 months at Chitral, and then for two years at Peshawar. Meanwhile, Kashmir was killed by some relatives when he was on his way to Kabul—after converting to Islam—to meet the Amir and seek from him his previous high status. More:

See Kafiristan in Wikipedia:

Prof. Georg Morgenstierne travelled extensively throughout South Asia, but the most unique were his visits to the inaccessible areas of The Hindu Kush Mountains. Read his account here.

]]> http://www.asianwindow.com/afghanistan/forgotten-victims-of-great-games/feed/ 0 http://www.asianwindow.com/india/the-mahajans/ http://www.asianwindow.com/india/the-mahajans/#comments Sun, 14 Mar 2010 05:27:37 +0000 asianwindow http://www.asianwindow.com/?p=13302 One of India’s most powerful politicians is killed by his brother. Son goes on drug orgy, friend dies. Killer brother dies in jail. Now son gets married on reality TV. Here is a family that is stranger than fiction. Haima Deshpande in Open:

On a day when Rahul Mahajan upped the TRP ratings for a TV channel and married Dimpy Ganguli on a reality show, his deceased uncle Pravin Mahajan’s ashes had just been immersed. Pravin’s family did not know of Rahul’s wedding as they had not watched TV for some time. On that evening when Rahul gained a substantial sum of money from the show, his uncle’s family was looking for ways and means to pay off the Rs 18 lakh hospital bill accumulated over 82 days of Pravin’s hospitalisation and subsequent death due to brain haemorrhage.

The three years since the death of Pramod Mahajan, who fell to the bullets of his brother Pravin on 26 April 2006, have kept the Mahajans in the spotlight. They have made headlines with amazing frequency. When Pravin died on 3 March this year, whispers of foul play got a few decibels shriller. Convicted for his brother’s murder, Pravin was serving a life sentence at the Nasik central prison. He was granted a 14-day furlough as his wife Sarangi had an acute gynaecological problem which needed surgery. She was adamant on undergoing the medical procedure only if her husband was with her.

On the last day of his furlough, Pravin was hospitalised following brain haemorrhage. More:

Novelist Sir Salman Rushdie, Emory professor Dr. Deepika Bahri, filmmaker Deepa Mehta and writer Christopher Hitchens discuss love, sex, writing, stories and friendship. The conversation was inspired by Rushdie’s assertion in his 1999 essay on the anniversary of the fatwa that “love feels more and more like the only subject.” Emory University.

Indian filmmaker Deepa Mehta and Dr. Matthew Bernstein, Emory Professor of Film Studies, discuss Mehta’s friendship with Salman Rushdie, her beautiful Elements film trilogy, issues of censorship in India and Mehta’s forthcoming adaptation of Rushdie’s novel “Midnight’s Children.” Emory University

Two decades of research into saris throw up some little-known facts about the versatile garment. Veena Venugopal in Mint-Lounge:

Sari - Traditiion and Beyond; Roli Books

The sari, caught in a vicious knot of dropping demand and the slow death of weaving traditions, is Rta Kapur Chishti’s life mission.

Chishti, 61, started researching the handloom sari over 20 years ago. She travelled to all the traditional handloom centres and studied the weaving, dyeing and draping methods. She chronicles this in her book Saris: Tradition and Beyond. The book also demonstrates 108 ways of draping the sari, with step-by-step graphics.

When we meet, she is dressed in a grey Ikat, draped without a petticoat, so the bottom is more pantaloon, less sari. That style, she says, is a combination of two or three drapes. “I wear the sari based on what activities I have scheduled for the day. This is the run-around and get a thousand things done drape,” she says. Draping it differently and reinventing it to suit modern-day living is Chishti’s solution to reviving the sari. More:

Born in December 1946, Sonia got her certificate at 18. She’s had no education since. Her important qualification is for English, but those who watch her on television are struck by how poor her English is. She cannot express complex ideas in it.

The Nehru-Gandhis were all dull students. Rajiv failed in Cambridge, Indira failed in Oxford, Sanjay failed in high school and Nehru didn’t shine at Trinity.

It’s unlikely Sonia knows much about world history. If she has read Seneca and Cicero she doesn’t show it. Those unburdened by education, like Sanjay Gandhi, find it easier to view things as either good or bad. How has this affected Sonia’s decisions? We shall see later.

Sonia is slim and fit. At the dining table, she is probably disciplined. She looks younger than 64. Her aesthetic sense may be seen in her understated saris. She dresses in neat perfection, like an Italian woman. Her manner isn’t brusque. With the press she’s polite, and listens before responding. Her tone rarely changes. When attacking BJP leaders, she uses the oblique unko or unhonein. This distances her from them, while BJP is crude and direct with her. Her Hindi is broken, but she persists with it through a sentence, unlike urban Indians who mix Hindi with English. More:

From The Guardian:

Have you got six months off? Do you fancy a long walk? If so, World Expeditions may have just the holiday for you. They have become the only trekking outfit to offer a guided trip along the first completed section of the Great Himalayan Trail (GHT).

Stretching for 1,700km along the length of Nepal, the GHT will take you a mere 157 days to complete. You’ll see eight of the world’s 14 peaks over 8,000m, including Everest, and cross passes reaching up to 6,000m, climbing a total of 150,000m. That’s a Snowdon every day for half a year. Oh, and it will set you back £20,500.

The GHT isn’t the world’s longest long-distance footpath. The Continental Divide Trail in the US is 5,000km and the Trans Canada will be three times that. But this steroidal version of the Pennine Way looks like being the most coveted of all. Eventually, the trail’s originators hope it will stretch from the mighty 8,000m peak Nanga Parbat in Pakistan, considered the westernmost outlier of the Himalaya, to Namche Barwa in Tibet. It will connect five Asian countries – Bhutan, China, India, Nepal and Pakistan. More:

http://www.thegreathimalayatrail.org/

Click here to watch the IPL matches live on YouTube

The IPL, six weeks of razzmatazz and TV with a little sport, is predicted to double last year’s takings. Jason Burke in The Guardian:

It is already big and brash. It is about to get substantially bigger and brasher. At 8pm on Friday, hundreds of millions of people in India, from tea shops in Mumbai slums to plush Delhi suburbs and thousands of villages in between, will sit down to watch the Deccan Chargers play the Kolkata Knight Riders in the opening match of the third season of the Indian Premier League (IPL).

“If you thought the first two seasons were the ultimate cricket-meets-entertainment blockbusters then you haven’t seen anything yet,” enthused the Financial Express newspaper.

The IPL phenomenon cuts across all barriers of class, caste and income. At the exclusive Tollygunge Club in Kolkata – or Calcutta as it is often still known – staff will take a few hours out while members halt their golf, squash and riding. Both clientele and staff (more surreptitiously) will watch the fast and furious 20-over cricket shown on a big screen on the wall of the main bar. “It doesn’t matter who wins. It’s the game that counts,” said Sajad Mundal, the chief steward. For 10-year-old Anvam Najpal, sipping a soft drink that Mundal had just brought him, the tournament has already started. At his exclusive private school, a mini IPL, with just 10 overs played, is already under way. He is a Deccan Chargers fan. His dad however supports the Delhi Daredevils.

“But we will all watch it together,” he said. “Mum’s not that interested, but she’ll watch it with us. I really like seeing all the different people from all over the world playing together in unity.” More:

Pondicherry: A dark wind blew into this sleepy, coastal town recently — it carried the threat of global terrorism, of bombs and gunmen and unprovoked attacks on soft targets.

On Feb. 13, people thought to be Islamic terrorists bombed a restaurant in the northern city of Pune, killing 17 people. Speculation followed that the location had been chosen for its popularity with Western tourists. The government warned that terrorists appeared to be targeting foreigners in India, and soon a specific advisory was issued for this former French colonial outpost, a popular tourist destination usually associated with yoga, spirituality and the quest for inner peace.

A team of commandos in combat gear was seen driving around town in a jeep, automatic rifles at the ready.

At the French Consulate, on the beach road, where middle-aged pensioners take their evening walks, security forces set up roadblocks and sandbags.

The police and extra security were evident at hotels and tourist attractions. In a depressingly familiar — yet in these parts, utterly new — routine, visitors were frisked, and bags were examined. More:

The island nation of the Maldives, confronted by rising oceans and a landscape that is just a few feet above sea level, is poised to build a floating golf course and convention centre in what could be the first of a series of futuristic off-shore developments designed to confront the threat of global warming.

The country’s government has signed an agreement with a Dutch firm to investigate the feasibility of developing a number of facilities that would be located among the 26 main atolls. It is likely the company, Dutch Docklands, will also look into the possibility of building floating homes. It has previously built floating islands in Dubai.

“The methods and procedures developed by the company for floating developments reduce the impact on underwater life, and minimise the changes to coastal morphology,” said a statement issued by the office of President Mohamed Nasheed. More:

TALIBAN OVERHAUL IMAGE TO WIN ALLIES

The Taliban have embarked on a sophisticated information war, using modern media tools as well as some old-fashioned ones, to soften their image. . . . The dictates include bans on suicide bombings against civilians, burning down schools, or cutting off ears, lips and tongues. —The Times.

Isn’t it time you took another look at . . . the Taliban™?

Not your father’s Taliban™. The New Taliban™. TalibanLite™.

We know what you’re thinking: “The Taliban™? Aren’t they the dudes who blow up shit and cut off body parts?”

LOL! You’re thinking of the Old Taliban™.

How do we know what you’re thinking?

Focus groups.

You’re, like, “Focus groups? Since when do the Taliban™ do focus groups?”

We’re, like, “Since Domino’s Pizza started doing them.”

You told Domino’s their crust tasted like cardboard and their sauce tasted like ketchup. Harsh, right? But your criticism only made their pizza much tastier. At the New Taliban™, we want to be the Domino’s of extremists. More:

‘Kavi’, American director Gregg Helvey’s short film (19 minutes) in Hindi about an Indian slave boy, has lost out the Oscar in the Best Short Film (Live Action) category to the Danish entry ‘The New Tenants.’

Read more at kavithemovie.com and here and here

Love in its many forms and interpretations—benevolent and malignant, sororal and maternal, instinctive and presumed—is the motif of Sri Lankan-origin writer Ru Freeman’s first book, without doubt one of the most compelling novels you’ll read this year. A Disobedient Girl is such an accomplished work that it is hard to believe it’s a first novel: At the same time, its wisdom and temperance say much for a delayed debut.

A delayed debut, ironically, is the prime motivator for Freeman’s two protagonists: Latha, a young girl, chafes at the bit in a well-off Colombo household where she is at once a playmate to a girl her own age and a servant. Miles away, Biso, a woman yet to turn 30, decides to escape a brutal marriage with her three children, and break out into her own. Alternating chapters focus on their separate lives, while delicately hinting at a shared heritage and a common need for a place they know they deserve in a larger world. More: