In The Times of India, Sharmistha Gooptu, who is doing a PhD thesis on Indian film at the University of Chicago, on the Jodhaa Akbar cntroversy
Jodhaa Akbar, the love story of emperor Akbar and his Rajput queen Jodhabai, has been decreed non-historical by historians. That’s no great surprise: the love story of Jodha and Akbar as a Bollywood film would necessarily need to be ‘created’ by the director. No history book in the world provides much insight into, whether Akbar had, or had not, ever married a Rajput princess named Jodhabai.
One does not need to be an expert of Mughal history to spot discrepancies in the film’s period reconstruction. For instance, would a Mughal queen step into the shahi (royal) kitchen and cook a meal for her husband, or would she actually make an appearance before his courtiers to serve him lunch, with the queen mother looking on? Possibly not. The film is most clearly a work of fiction built on a skeleton of history, with some characters who are ‘real’, others imaginary.
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On the blog pakteahouse, the full text of Nighat Said Khan’s open letter to Fatima Bhutto, published in The Friday Times, and a question: If Fatima does not believe in heirs or dynasties, then why is her immediate family doing political business in the name of late Murtaza Bhutto?
It is for bread we fight, but we fight for roses too…
Dear Fatima,
I looked forward to your articles over much of 2007. I read you with interest. My sense of you was of a serious and sincere young woman who had sensitivity and an openness that was engaging.
Unfortunately, your personalized attack on Benazir Bhutto a couple of months ago jolted me. As a reader, I don’t want to be part of the internal pain and betrayals of the Bhutto family. My concern is only at the level of what the Bhuttos were, are and will be in the public sphere. I respected Benazir Bhutto for many things (while being only too critical of her failings) but I was particularly appreciative of the fact that she didn’t wash her family linen in public even under extreme provocation. Nor, I understand, did she indulge in personal vendettas or bear grudges. She was either “polite” or magnanimous. Either way, I felt better that she was not publicly vicious and that she kept her personal pain and betrayals to herself. I always felt that she dealt with me as a citizen and a woman and in that gave me respect.
As a feminist I am appalled that you are so deriding of Benazir as a woman.
[Nighat Said Khan is the Director of Institute for Women’s Studies, Lahore/Applied Socio-economic Research Center, Pakistan]
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In India, as frog species soar, so do battles over who found them. Jacob P. Coshy in Mint:
Pretty much like the Indian economy, the number of new frog species in the country appears to have boomed. In the seven years ended 2007, 18 new species have been discovered from the Western Ghats – the largest find in any decade in the last 100 years…
… the spurt in discovery of new species of frogs in the Western Ghats has encountered a controversy, following a dispute over the veracity of one of the claims. It has, in its wake, raised questions on the process and the ethics, particularly with respect to the practice of killing the frogs to preserve a specimen associated with the discovery of a new species.
[Photo: India's smallest known frog yet]
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Sports commentator Pradeep Magazine in Hindustan Times.
Is Sania Mirza’s ‘No’ to India the anguished cry of a young, successful, talented player to her nation to please let her live and breathe?
She is 21. She is a woman. She is a Muslim. And by any yardstick, one of India’s most successful international sportsperson. She plays a sport, which unlike cricket, is played all over the world. In that sport she is ranked 29th and the next best ranked Indian in the world could be a man ranked anywhere between 300 and 10,000!
And one day she screams at the top of her voice that she doesn’t want to play in India. Oh, Why?
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In The Indian Express, Viren Rasquinha, a former captain of India’s national hockey team, on tennis star Sania Mirza’s decision to skip Indian tournament.
If the news that Sania Mirza is seriously contemplating to skip the Bangalore Open and maybe all future tournaments in India were to be true, it would be a tragedy for Indian sport. I say tragedy because let’s face the facts. Besides cricket, sport in India has very few genuine stars and household names. And Sania is not just a star, her appeal far transcends that. She is a role model and an icon to millions of little girls in a country where women sports stars can be counted on the fingertips of one hand.
Expectations of her have very often been unrealistically high and sometimes she is expected to pulverise every opponent into submission, even if it happens to be one of the Williams sisters across the net. But more than that I really feel sorry for her, because at times her national commitment has been questioned and she has been strangled by the religious issues surrounding her attire and endorsements.
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She says she’s tired of being dragged into trivial controversies, reports The Telegraph, Calcutta.
Sania Mirza, whose attitude, attire and aggression came to symbolise the emergence of a new India, will not play in her country this year because of recurring controversies off the court. “People are criticising me for either the length of my skirt or appearance in ads or for insulting the national flag. Do I have to prove my patriotism again and again?” the 21-year-old tennis player asked in Hyderabad. The first casualty of the announcement is next month’s Bangalore Open. The Williams sisters – Sania won a billion hearts after losing to Serena in an Australian Open match full of verve in 2005 – are slated to play in Bangalore.
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We do live in times where political correctness can take bizarre overtones. Namita Bhandare in Mint.
So, I’m wondering: is it OK to be sexist but not so OK to be racist? I ask this question not in the background of Hillary vs Obama but maa ki vs monkey.
Now, if you’ve ever sat in a DTC bus in Delhi, you’ll be pretty familiar with the maa ki lexicon. In its expanded form, it refers not to motherly love but to a rather delicate part of her anatomy. Harbhajan Singh has admitted to referring disparagingly to Andrew Symonds’s mother (and I’m sure Zinedine Zidane has some thoughts on this), which, in some strange way, is less offensive than if he had called him a monkey, an animal that is venerated and even worshipped in India.
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The blizzard of off-court controversies into which Sania Mirza has been dragged cannot lay her low, writes her uncle Maseeh Rahman in the Indian Express
“Come on. Keep fighting!” For a while on Show Court 3 at the Australian Open on Thursday, it seemed as if Sania Mirza was going to buckle under the pressure and surrender. After winning the first set 6-1 in her typically aggressive style, her game had faltered, and she looked pensive as she submitted 4-6 in the second. Now she was down 1-3 in the decider, and her Swiss-Hungarian opponent Timea Bacsinszky threatened to run away with the match.
The exhortation from the players’ box had come from her father, Imran Mirza, and it had sounded like part instruction, part encouragement. Like many Indian families, the Mirzas are extremely close-knit, and Imran has played a pivotal role in Sania’s emergence as a world-class tennis player. I still remember my surprise when, visiting her house in Hyderabad many years ago, I discovered that Imran and his wife Naseema were about to set off for Thiruvanthapuram in their beat-up Maruti Esteem so that Sania could participate in a tennis tournament. They couldn’t afford to fly.
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