Movies, Photos, Bombay, and Banks
“The man who said “I’d rather be lucky than good” saw deeply into life. People are afraid to face how great a part of life is dependent on luck. It’s scary to think so much is out of one’s control. There are moments in a match when the ball hits the top of the net, and for a split second, it can either go forward or fall back. With a litte luck, it goes forward, and you win. Or maybe it doesn’t, and you lose.”
~Opening line in the movie Match Point, which is a very good movie.
I’ve seen a few movies recently, which is really odd considering how few I’ve seen in general. In the past couple weeks, I’ve seen Provoked and Parzania, both of which are true stories, which are typically the movies I like the most. I also recently saw Blood Diamond, which was also really good… So 3 activist-ish movies in the past couple of weeks.
Provoked is the true story of a Punjabi woman named Kiranjit Ahluwalia (Aishwarya Rai) who leaves India to marry a London-based guy (Naveen Andrews), and ends up being badly abused by her husband. She ends up lighting him on fire and in prison for murdering. It’s a pretty touching story, and Aish actually acts quite well (for the first time, I might add). She acts well enough that you geniunely feel sorry for this woman, despite the fact that she murdered her husband. My favorite actor in the movie is her cell-mate, and eventual closest friend “Ronnie” though… The tagline of the movie is “In prison she found freedom,” and it makes a lot of sense when you watch it. Basically, the harsh realities of the world inside the prison with criminals start to harden Kiranjit to fend for herself, and she makes a bunch of new friends.
The sad thing is, noone is watching this movie in India. I saw it with 2 aunts in Bombay, and we were the only ones in the theater, and there were tons of people watching other screens. I guess it’s still hard to make films that make you think and get a broad audience… I think the most successful (and one of my favorite movies ever) is Rang De Basanti.
Parzania is a movie by an American Director, Bakul Dholakia. It’s about a family that gets caught in the riots that occurred in Gujarat in 2002, and loses their son. I saw a pirated version of the film… The actual film hasn’t been shown anywhere in Gujarat, because a terrible organization called the Bajrang Dal has threatened the cinema halls with violence. These are the same guys that are trying to ban Valentines day, inter-caste and inter-religious marriages, and even trying to disallow Muslims from owning land in Gujarat, by attacking traders who sell to Muslims and by attacking Muslim homes and forcing the sale of the house or flat. Their methods of accomplishing things are often very violent, yet they have a lot of support in the state.
Because the copy of Parzania was a poorly pirated version, I think it’s hard to be totally fair. The version I saw was full of terrible edits, a lot of gratuitous swearing, and uneccessary sub-plot lines, but I’ve heard that the final version doesn’t have these issues. I didn’t think the acting was that great, despite Nasserudin Shah being one of my favorite actors (Watch Iqbal!). They way they show the violence that occurs is pretty good, but I’ve seen documentaries that were far more powerful. I wish I’d seen a legitimate copy of the film. Still, it’s a good primer to the violence that occurred in Gujarat, although it only depicts Hindus killing Muslims, and its important to note that the reverse happenned as well.
Blood Diamond was great… I assume you know what it’s about… Blood diamonds are diamonds mined in war zones and sold to finance the conflicts. Watch this movie. Also, read this article - it’s really really good and full of information that you should know before buying a diamond. It’s all hype. It’s from the Feb. 1982 Atlantic Monthly, but it’s a really really good read. From my Interesting Stuff I Read page, Have you ever tried to sell a diamond?
Indicorps intern Kajal (link to her photopage) has been teaching me some photography skills of late, so I’ve spent some time practicing. Nothing great so far, but learning how to use ISO and exposure , how to frame a picture, and how to do some edits in photoshop (all of this stuff I sorta knew, but never used on my tiny digital camera). The biggest learning so far is about low light situations… I ever photographed them properly before, now I’m learning that flash is bad, and I like that because I hate that everyone knows that you’ve taken a picture.
Here are some pictures of a night where a bunch of us went to eat some Gola. Gola is an Indian Ice slushie type thing, very popular in the summer months. It’s shaved ice with some syrup on top. I actually don’t really like it. You can typically get them for about 5 rupees (12 cents)… The place we went to was almost 30 rupees though! This place puts actual fruit into the mix, and does a TON of business with this differentiation. Anand said he heard they do 15,000 rupees ($350) worth of business a night, which is a ton for a roadside business. It’s amazing to me that so many people were willing to pay so much extra for a slight difference. They have tons and tons of flavors:
So I was in Ahmedabad for 6 weeks after the last Indicorps workshop… It’s probably the longest I’ve stayed in the same city since college. After college, I worked for a couple of consulting firms and was travelling pretty constantly for work, and also for personal trips, so 6 weeks is a long time for me. It’s crazy to think that I’ve been travelling so much for so long.
I finally left last week. I went to Bombay for a couple of meetings. I have mixed feelings about Bombay - it’s too big and everything takes too long and is too expensive and dirty, and people don’t have time for you, but it’s nice because I know a lot of people and there’s always something new to do. It’s exactly the same as New York in that regard. The first night there I met up and stayed with my old music teacher from Pittsburgh. The guy that I took voice and harmonium (keyboard) lessons from a decade ago is now the CIO of Reliance Communications ($20 billion mobile and infocomm giant). Pretty cool how random connections and a person’s network can be.
Everytime I think we have a solution for getting Kiva.org started in India, there is a setback. My current worry is about this story that the RBI has had too much inflow of External Commercial Borrowing for this year. As you can tell from the article, it doesn’t seem like a very well thought out process (as is the case with many regulations in India)… we’re going through an approval process with the RBI, and I really hope that this doesn’t affect the approval (we’re only talking about $500k out of the $22billion!). Pray for us!
I’m off to Baroda, then heading to Pune, then to Panchgani, which is where we have our Indicorps workshop this time. I’m really looking forward to this little retreat. Here’s the site of our workshop http://www.in.iofc.org/ap.
