The past and present HollywoodThe world can never forget Elizabeth Taylor. She was the most glamorous person. She belonged to the topmost league of Hollywood actors. Between 1940 and 1970 Hollywood boasted of possessing extraordinary actresses and Elizabeth Taylor was one of those actresses. She could be loud. She could understate. She could be ironic, romantic or tragic. She looked great with sunglasses and pearls, parasols and cigarette holders. She had a style of her own. She was the favourite of all the film gossip columnists.
Elizabeth Taylor had terrific contemporaries. There was Katharine Hepburn whose cheekbones and intelligence became legend. There was Viven Leigh, famed for her pert beauty and a mouth that smiled sweetly while making tart remarks. Liz Taylor herself chose roles which were as gutsy as her looks. Then there was Audrey Hepburn whose charm was ethereal. There was Gracy Kelly who was another beauty. Marilyn Monroe was a blonde who broke the brunette hegemony.
All these ladies had looks as well as talents. Their careers took off with America's post-war boom. They had an extraordinary variety of roles, often based on novels, plays and legends. There was Leigh as Blanche DuBois in Tennessee William's disturbing work A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Taylor as Maggie in Williams's Cat On A Hot Tin Roof (1958) and Audrey Hepburn as the conflicted escort girl Holly Golightly in an adaptation of Truman Capote's novel Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961). Such scripts offered strong female parts, featuring heroines simultaneously calculating and charming, selfish and sweet, unsure and confident. Their style of acting endeared them to audiences. They were in demand. There were large studios making films which stoked their public personas and kept the box office buzzing.
Things changed in 1970s. Film business became like a corporate. The film makers couldn't tolerate eccentric stars and massive budgets. Scripts changed. America entered a phase of intensive warring, action movies exploded, placing the spotlight firmly on muscular male protagonists. The above divas were replaced by a bunch of fresh-faced younger actresses who played the roles of 'everyday' women you might pass in the street, not stop to stare at. The female protagonists were no more shown as calculating creatures, sizing up men over the rim of their cocktails, often ethically shaky. The heroines were now depicted as professionals or home-makers and they were pictures of goodness.
Thus there was a great difference between Hollywood during Liz Taylor's heydays and Hollywood as it is now.
English language is not the property of Indian Catholics
English language is the property of not all but few of the Catholics in the World. English language belongs to the British and Americans only. These two countries are the genuine owners of English language. But there are many Indian Catholics who pretend or rather fool the Indians into believing that English language is their property. In fact, there is hardly any Indian Catholic family whose mother tongue is English. Almost all the Catholic families in India have some Indian language other than English as their mother tongue. But English is certainly not their mother tongue. Probably only a negligible number of Anglo-Indian families existing in India can boast of possessing English language as their mother tongue.
English language was introduced to the Indians by the British when they had colonized India. There were many members of all the communities in India, whether they were Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Parsees, Sindhis or Catholics, who picked up the English language during the reign of British in India.
After the British left the shores of India, English continued to be taught to more and more Indians by not just the Indian Catholics but also by Anglicized Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Sindhis, Parsees, etc. There were foreign missionaries who established convent schools in many places in India. These missionaries employed in their schools both Catholics and non-Catholics English teachers to impart education in English to all the Indians whether they were Catholics or non-Catholics. These convent schools sprung up at places wherever there were churches. But in India, it was not just convent schools which were imparting English education. In fact, many non-Catholic anglicized Indians too built schools that imparted English education.
Today we find that side by side with convent schools there is a big number of non-convent English schools too flourishing in India. We find that English education is not just imparted by Catholics teachers but also by a huge number of non-Catholic teachers.
Hence this practice of associating English language with Indian Catholics should be stopped simply because it is not true that Indian Catholics are the owners of English language. They certainly are not. The anglicized people from all the Indian communities deserve the credit for borrowing English language from the British and spreading it to a huge number of Indians belonging to all the Indian communities.
It's tough to be a parent todayOne more child went through the macabre ritual of reaching up to attach a rope to a ceiling fan, tying a slip knot, putting her neck into it and kicking away the stool. How did the girl know the method of committing suicide and how did she gather the courage to do it?
Eleven year old Sayoni Chatterjee's suicide reminded many of Neha Sawant, also 11, and Sushant Patil, 12, who also had hanged themselves. The death of a young child is unbearable and you feel horrified when the death is by committing suicide. Then we get the news of a mother who gave the fatal push to her three year old daughter and six year old son. She pushed them out one by one from the 19th floor before taking the final leap herself. Horrible!
Shampa Chatterjee, the mother of Sayoni, had chanced upon her daughter's 'personal diary' heaving with her outpourings about a boy in her class, and did what many a similarly enraged parent would automatically do. She first confronted the child, and then marched off in high indignation to the school. A petrified Sayoni pleaded with her not to take the matter to the principal. But the mother was unmoved. She waited to see the headmistress, and when she returned home, she came upon the terrible sight.
You can't blame Sayoni's mother for this incident. She didn't overreact to the diary. It was natural for her to feel provoked. Any other parent too would have reacted in blind rage to a similar discovery. Mrs Chatterjee had displayed only the 'normal' paranoia you can sense in every mother of a young daughter today. She only meant to protect her daughter and prevent her from being treated in a similar manner again. Just her one protecting act turned out to be the cause of the death of her child.
Children today become mature at a very young age. It is high time all the parents became aware of this fact. Parents who take their children lightly might have to pay for it the way it happened with Shampa Chatterjee. This incident proves as to how tough it is to be a parent in today's world. It's not enough to just give birth to a child. You have to know the modern methods of childcare too.
Who cares for non-human deaths?We have a moral consensus on the essentially scandalous nature of death by accident or intent. We kill in order to defend country, community, even ideology. Suicide-bombers become breaking news and wars give birth to award-winning films. Evil makes man kill; the good in him makes prime time and high art out of it. Many of us are we voracious consumers of disaster stories, like the tragic one coming out of quake-hit Japan. Man's undoing at human hands or by nature's fury works as moral recompense for his own aggression. Of course, the victims of violence must necessarily be human to move us.
What about non-humans? Man however sheds non-human blood on a huge scale. In calamities, natural or manmade, non-human deaths are deemed a trifle unless at our economic cost. When tsunamis strike or cities are bombed, we assess depletion of 'livestock' or 'fish stocks'. Who cares that animals and birds also perish in floods and forest fires, zoo animals starve in war-ravaged towns, and marine life chokes in oil spills and fishing's overkill?
Violence against non-human species is global in scope, colossal in cruelty. Canada's seal hunts are brutal. Japan's slaughter of near-extinct whales, bluefin tuna and dolphins is horrible. Chinese bear bile, food and fur farms provoke outrage; so does "canned hunting" of captive lions and tigers from the US to South Africa. Dogfights are a blood sport in Mexico. Spain's conservative politicians want bullfighting declared world heritage. And everywhere, every year, billions of living beings perish in meat-producing plants, experimentation labs, aquaculture...The scandal sits easy on civilised consciences.
Hog factory sows are 'farmed' as breeding machines till they burn out. Mutilated lab chimps are caged entire lives. Salmon turn cannibals when bred in polluted, overcrowded ponds.
These slaughterhouses, labs, fur farms, etc, should be kept out of sight since civilized humans can't tolerate them. Thus silence reigns over the terrorization of non-human species everywhere on Earth.
We should learn from Japan Many are dead, injured or missing following the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan. But there is no information on damage to other life forms.
The pressure and force caused by tsunamis and earthquakes could destroy coral reefs, fish populations, mangroves and other aquatic life. Natural disasters could be devastating not just for people but also for non-humans. What happened in Japan ought to concern us. As human beings we are not divorced from the ecosystems in which we live. No human can survive without an ecosystem to cater to his needs.
One feels shocked to see the images of devastation and suffering streaming out of Japan. The damage in terms of human lives has been shocking. This was the worst earthquake in Japan's recorded history, followed by a tsunami originating close to Japanese shores that was even more devastating.
But the credit must go to successive Japanese administrations and to civil society itself for keeping the damage to a limit. The Japanese have drawn their lessons from the past disasters. They have the most sophisticated earthquake early warning systems to an extensive tsunami warning sensor network; from building codes that keep such exigencies in mind to thorough disaster management plans at every administrative level. Yet the scale of the tragedy is colossal and Japan badly needs the support of rest of the world. India too should help in whatever capacity it can.
India must also learn a lesson from Japan. The Indian subcontinent is prone to dangerous earthquakes with five having taken place in the past two decades. A survey indicates that a big part of the country is at some risk of experiencing an earthquake, and several major metropolitan centres fall in high-risk zones. The World Health Organisation has rated India's disaster preparedness fairly well, but there is a difference between adequate policies and effective implementation. For instance, very few institutions here offer any training in earthquake engineering or integrate it with civil engineering.
Development of better building codes, strict enforcement of existing ones, creation of disaster management plans and response bodies from the local level to the central, streamlining of the relevant administrative machinery with funding and jurisdiction clearly demarcated - these are all measures the government must take, and soon. A thorough safety audit must be conducted of Indian nuclear plants - to test whether they can withstand the severest possible earthquakes.
We have to take all these measures as a kind of precaution
Elizabeth Taylor had terrific contemporaries. There was Katharine Hepburn whose cheekbones and intelligence became legend. There was Viven Leigh, famed for her pert beauty and a mouth that smiled sweetly while making tart remarks. Liz Taylor herself chose roles which were as gutsy as her looks. Then there was Audrey Hepburn whose charm was ethereal. There was Gracy Kelly who was another beauty. Marilyn Monroe was a blonde who broke the brunette hegemony.
All these ladies had looks as well as talents. Their careers took off with America's post-war boom. They had an extraordinary variety of roles, often based on novels, plays and legends. There was Leigh as Blanche DuBois in Tennessee William's disturbing work A Streetcar Named Desire (1947), Taylor as Maggie in Williams's Cat On A Hot Tin Roof (1958) and Audrey Hepburn as the conflicted escort girl Holly Golightly in an adaptation of Truman Capote's novel Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961). Such scripts offered strong female parts, featuring heroines simultaneously calculating and charming, selfish and sweet, unsure and confident. Their style of acting endeared them to audiences. They were in demand. There were large studios making films which stoked their public personas and kept the box office buzzing.
Things changed in 1970s. Film business became like a corporate. The film makers couldn't tolerate eccentric stars and massive budgets. Scripts changed. America entered a phase of intensive warring, action movies exploded, placing the spotlight firmly on muscular male protagonists. The above divas were replaced by a bunch of fresh-faced younger actresses who played the roles of 'everyday' women you might pass in the street, not stop to stare at. The female protagonists were no more shown as calculating creatures, sizing up men over the rim of their cocktails, often ethically shaky. The heroines were now depicted as professionals or home-makers and they were pictures of goodness.
Thus there was a great difference between Hollywood during Liz Taylor's heydays and Hollywood as it is now.
English language is not the property of Indian Catholics
English language is the property of not all but few of the Catholics in the World. English language belongs to the British and Americans only. These two countries are the genuine owners of English language. But there are many Indian Catholics who pretend or rather fool the Indians into believing that English language is their property. In fact, there is hardly any Indian Catholic family whose mother tongue is English. Almost all the Catholic families in India have some Indian language other than English as their mother tongue. But English is certainly not their mother tongue. Probably only a negligible number of Anglo-Indian families existing in India can boast of possessing English language as their mother tongue.
English language was introduced to the Indians by the British when they had colonized India. There were many members of all the communities in India, whether they were Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Parsees, Sindhis or Catholics, who picked up the English language during the reign of British in India.
After the British left the shores of India, English continued to be taught to more and more Indians by not just the Indian Catholics but also by Anglicized Hindus, Muslims, Sikhs, Sindhis, Parsees, etc. There were foreign missionaries who established convent schools in many places in India. These missionaries employed in their schools both Catholics and non-Catholics English teachers to impart education in English to all the Indians whether they were Catholics or non-Catholics. These convent schools sprung up at places wherever there were churches. But in India, it was not just convent schools which were imparting English education. In fact, many non-Catholic anglicized Indians too built schools that imparted English education.
Today we find that side by side with convent schools there is a big number of non-convent English schools too flourishing in India. We find that English education is not just imparted by Catholics teachers but also by a huge number of non-Catholic teachers.
Hence this practice of associating English language with Indian Catholics should be stopped simply because it is not true that Indian Catholics are the owners of English language. They certainly are not. The anglicized people from all the Indian communities deserve the credit for borrowing English language from the British and spreading it to a huge number of Indians belonging to all the Indian communities.
It's tough to be a parent todayOne more child went through the macabre ritual of reaching up to attach a rope to a ceiling fan, tying a slip knot, putting her neck into it and kicking away the stool. How did the girl know the method of committing suicide and how did she gather the courage to do it?
Eleven year old Sayoni Chatterjee's suicide reminded many of Neha Sawant, also 11, and Sushant Patil, 12, who also had hanged themselves. The death of a young child is unbearable and you feel horrified when the death is by committing suicide. Then we get the news of a mother who gave the fatal push to her three year old daughter and six year old son. She pushed them out one by one from the 19th floor before taking the final leap herself. Horrible!
Shampa Chatterjee, the mother of Sayoni, had chanced upon her daughter's 'personal diary' heaving with her outpourings about a boy in her class, and did what many a similarly enraged parent would automatically do. She first confronted the child, and then marched off in high indignation to the school. A petrified Sayoni pleaded with her not to take the matter to the principal. But the mother was unmoved. She waited to see the headmistress, and when she returned home, she came upon the terrible sight.
You can't blame Sayoni's mother for this incident. She didn't overreact to the diary. It was natural for her to feel provoked. Any other parent too would have reacted in blind rage to a similar discovery. Mrs Chatterjee had displayed only the 'normal' paranoia you can sense in every mother of a young daughter today. She only meant to protect her daughter and prevent her from being treated in a similar manner again. Just her one protecting act turned out to be the cause of the death of her child.
Children today become mature at a very young age. It is high time all the parents became aware of this fact. Parents who take their children lightly might have to pay for it the way it happened with Shampa Chatterjee. This incident proves as to how tough it is to be a parent in today's world. It's not enough to just give birth to a child. You have to know the modern methods of childcare too.
Who cares for non-human deaths?We have a moral consensus on the essentially scandalous nature of death by accident or intent. We kill in order to defend country, community, even ideology. Suicide-bombers become breaking news and wars give birth to award-winning films. Evil makes man kill; the good in him makes prime time and high art out of it. Many of us are we voracious consumers of disaster stories, like the tragic one coming out of quake-hit Japan. Man's undoing at human hands or by nature's fury works as moral recompense for his own aggression. Of course, the victims of violence must necessarily be human to move us.
What about non-humans? Man however sheds non-human blood on a huge scale. In calamities, natural or manmade, non-human deaths are deemed a trifle unless at our economic cost. When tsunamis strike or cities are bombed, we assess depletion of 'livestock' or 'fish stocks'. Who cares that animals and birds also perish in floods and forest fires, zoo animals starve in war-ravaged towns, and marine life chokes in oil spills and fishing's overkill?
Violence against non-human species is global in scope, colossal in cruelty. Canada's seal hunts are brutal. Japan's slaughter of near-extinct whales, bluefin tuna and dolphins is horrible. Chinese bear bile, food and fur farms provoke outrage; so does "canned hunting" of captive lions and tigers from the US to South Africa. Dogfights are a blood sport in Mexico. Spain's conservative politicians want bullfighting declared world heritage. And everywhere, every year, billions of living beings perish in meat-producing plants, experimentation labs, aquaculture...The scandal sits easy on civilised consciences.
Hog factory sows are 'farmed' as breeding machines till they burn out. Mutilated lab chimps are caged entire lives. Salmon turn cannibals when bred in polluted, overcrowded ponds.
These slaughterhouses, labs, fur farms, etc, should be kept out of sight since civilized humans can't tolerate them. Thus silence reigns over the terrorization of non-human species everywhere on Earth.
We should learn from Japan Many are dead, injured or missing following the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan. But there is no information on damage to other life forms.
The pressure and force caused by tsunamis and earthquakes could destroy coral reefs, fish populations, mangroves and other aquatic life. Natural disasters could be devastating not just for people but also for non-humans. What happened in Japan ought to concern us. As human beings we are not divorced from the ecosystems in which we live. No human can survive without an ecosystem to cater to his needs.
One feels shocked to see the images of devastation and suffering streaming out of Japan. The damage in terms of human lives has been shocking. This was the worst earthquake in Japan's recorded history, followed by a tsunami originating close to Japanese shores that was even more devastating.
But the credit must go to successive Japanese administrations and to civil society itself for keeping the damage to a limit. The Japanese have drawn their lessons from the past disasters. They have the most sophisticated earthquake early warning systems to an extensive tsunami warning sensor network; from building codes that keep such exigencies in mind to thorough disaster management plans at every administrative level. Yet the scale of the tragedy is colossal and Japan badly needs the support of rest of the world. India too should help in whatever capacity it can.
India must also learn a lesson from Japan. The Indian subcontinent is prone to dangerous earthquakes with five having taken place in the past two decades. A survey indicates that a big part of the country is at some risk of experiencing an earthquake, and several major metropolitan centres fall in high-risk zones. The World Health Organisation has rated India's disaster preparedness fairly well, but there is a difference between adequate policies and effective implementation. For instance, very few institutions here offer any training in earthquake engineering or integrate it with civil engineering.
Development of better building codes, strict enforcement of existing ones, creation of disaster management plans and response bodies from the local level to the central, streamlining of the relevant administrative machinery with funding and jurisdiction clearly demarcated - these are all measures the government must take, and soon. A thorough safety audit must be conducted of Indian nuclear plants - to test whether they can withstand the severest possible earthquakes.
We have to take all these measures as a kind of precaution
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