Desicritics Author: BrahmaRakshasa

Movie Review: Goodbye Lenin!

BrahmaRakshasa — Tue, 5 Jun 2007 00:05:46 EDT

Rarely can foreign flicks transcend the cold, lifeless feel of subtitles and strike a moving note, but, Wolfgang Becker's Goodbye Lenin does just that. Set in the troubled and fast changing communist GDR of the late 80's, the film is primarily centered around the idea of simulating an idealistic reality.

Christiane Kerner, a dedicated party worker and diehard communist suffers a heart attack after she witnesses her teenage son Alexander being arrested whilst taking part in a demonstration. She subsequently falls into a coma in October of 1989, only to awaken eight months later. In this time the Berlin Wall has fallen and all that she believed in has ceased to exist. The doctor warns Christiane's children that if she receives any further shocks in her present fragile state she will surely not make it. Alex begins an elaborate ruse, confining his mother to a single room and trying to make it seem like the times of the erstwhile GDR.

This is when this dark comedy comes into its own, with Alexander trying to find the drab and now elusive products that were rationed during the communist years and using the help of his budding film maker friend, Denis, to manufacture fictional news to explain the abnormalities that his mother witnesses. Alex's sister, Ariane and her Western boyfriend Rainer who now work at Burger King in the newly united and utterly commercialised Berlin, are the other perpetrators of this hoax. Alex tries to deal with the growing complexities of this deception alongwith the blossoming of his relationship with the pretty Russian nurse, Lara. Old friends of Christiane who have now lost the sense of purpose they had in the Socialist regime are also roped in to complete this reversal of reality. There is another thread to the story concerning Alex's father, who defects to the West when the children are still quite young and his meeting the family again in these tenuous times.

There are some surreal yet unforgotteable moments such as Christiane noticing a large Coca Cola banner being unfurled outside her window and on one occasion when she makes a solitary walk outside she is confronted with a helicopter carrying half a Lenin statue. What makes Goodbye Lenin work is that we have all experienced this paradigm in our lives, we create the realities that our families expect of us. Ultimately, the movie serves to remind us that deception can sometimes be the sign of the greatest love.

Hijab Haute Couture or Burkha Barbies

BrahmaRakshasa — Sun, 3 Jun 2007 01:50:23 EDT

While flipping channels I stumbled onto something that must have made a million feminists pop an artery or two: a fashion channel was showcasing the Malaysian International Fashion Week (MIFW for those who follow these things rather more closely).

The ramp residents were like at any other fashion week with one important difference - they were all covered up head to toe, including the traditional headscarve, the hijab.

No long legs, no bare arms and for the more risque amongst us, waiting for perhaps an unclad derriere, the wait was endless. It seems this is part of an initiative by the more conservative of the Malay community to make the hijab more, hold onto your headgear, trendy.

I guess this is why they were liberal enough not to make veils mandatory. It is hoped that through fashion shows like this the mindset of the young Malaysian female can be changed enough so that when asked to take off their hijab and liberate themselves by those legions of western kafirs, they can confidently reply back, "No thank you.I think the hijab is cooooooooooooool".

This is part of a larger initiative in the country during the last decade of Islamist revival which aims at making women who roam around with their head unclad (roughly 40% of the populace is not Muslim) feel their inherent lack of modesty and piety or so they tell us. A few of the Malay states have made it mandatory to wear the hijab and even forbid the non Muslim community from dressing in what they call revealing clothes.

If there ever was a way of making the Fashion industry even more ludicrous then the Islamic think tank has inadvertently found it.

Audio Book Review: Class War: The Attack On Working People by Noam Chomsky

BrahmaRakshasa — Sat, 2 Jun 2007 11:15:21 EDT

This seminal lecture recorded by Chomsky at MIT in 1995, captures the history and nature of the class war waged by corporations and rich people in a long diatribe peppered with the dry wit which is characteristic of his addresses.

Ol' Noam illustrates how corporations using the vast and limitless resources and powers available to them have successfully created an attitude of "anti politics" - a situation where governments are totally bought and controlled by giant all subsuming corporates. The government which is only the shadow of big business and not the substance is made to be the target of the ire, rage and dissatifaction of the so called "angry young white male".

Chomsky offers a theory that although this rage is real and pertinent, it is misdirected at the governance which is totally and utterly fettered to the dictums of bizland. Ze profesor quite eruditely covers the labor movement of the states and how the corporations were finally able to make it irrelevant. Although globalisation was a relatively new phenomena at the time, the observations thereof still hold, and give a strong feeling of unavoidable tyrrany.

Due to the new concept of global factors of production, corporations effectively have, what Chomsky likes to frequently refer to as the "pampered western workers" by the neck and have made any efforts on the part of workers to organize completely futile.

There are some interesting examples of causality which shock as well as perturb, for example very few of us now that the bond and currency markets surge when the employment and growth indices plummet. Chomsky concludes that crime does pay, especially when carried out by unstoppable fortune500 bandidos, and after listening to this audiobook I find it hard to disagree.

A must listen for a seldom heard viewpoint.

Book Review: Snow by Orhan Pamuk

BrahmaRakshasa — Fri, 1 Jun 2007 00:23:09 EDT

There are very few writers of our time who can give us a palatable version of poetic prose. Orhan Pamuk, who came into the international spotlight only recently, is a gifted wordsmith who can craft magical scenes in even the most joyless of landscapes.

Snow, the seventh novel by Pamuk traces the journey of Ka, a poet exiled to Germany for many a year back to the small, sleepy and isolated town of Kars. Kars has been grappling for the last few decades with the ideas of modernity and Islamism. This tussle of idealogies has come down to a dangerous triviality. A spate of young women who have been barred from wearing headscarves are killing themselves in the most routine and disturbingly unobstrusive way. Ka who has turned up in this town only on the vague hope of reuniting and wooing an old acquaintance, the beautiful Ipek, claims to be there to research and report the suicides of the headscarve girls for a western newspaper.

The narrator is Ka's friend, very unsurprisingly called Orhan, who retraces the journey, the changes, the thoughts and the etchings of the protagonist from the moment he reaches Kars to his eventual demise.The novel boasts of well devised and memorable characters. Kadife, the headstrong sister of Ipek and secretive lover of a prominent Islamist named Blue, provides another strong female viewpoint and a breath of fresh air to a largely male narrative. The mystique and danger represented by the enigmatic Blue is captured well and provides a dynamic spearhead to the idea of a likable radical.

The interactions of the well bred city boy Ka, with the provincial inhabitants are natural and provide a glimpse into Turkey's version of the bourgeios and the poor struggling to come to terms with each other. Each character has a clearly defined history and a vague suggested motivation for the events that take place in Kars, be it the fading stage actor who attempts to lead a coup or the religious Sheikh who dominates the hearts and minds of the orthodox Muslims.

The book provides a genuine and empathy arousing look at a country which has for quite sometime now been engaging in the eternal cascading of progressive and regressive movements. There are moments of dark comedy when the hopelessly out of tune with the times play called "My Fatherland or My Headscarf" is enacted in front of the bewildered populace and the coup that follows. There are some uniques viewpoints presented such as the idea that it is not poverty that drives the poor to religion but the fact that they are the most anxious to know why they are on Earth and what is their purpose.

Snow, in the end tries to address all the major issues facing small towns in Turkey and while this is done seamlessly, at times the ceaseless stream of depressive ponderings and happenings can get dreary. But then again, the colours that must be used to paint this period in the history and civilization of this ancient country can be anything but gray.

Book Review: Dom Moraes' My Son's Father - An Autobiography

BrahmaRakshasa — Thu, 31 May 2007 03:31:16 EDT

A fortunate quirk of fate presented this wonderful autobiography to me at the not so friendly confines of the neighbourhood second hand bookshop. Dom Moraes is one of the defining personalities of modern Indian writing in English. But due to my incapability in handling verse, I have been largely unacquainted with his work.

This charming piece of self documentation shows that Moraes is just as good with prose. Born to an illustrious background (father Frank Moraes being editor of Times of India for many a year), Dom brings a breath of fresh air to this genre as such.

This book is not like any other autobiography, primarily because he was thirty at the time he wrote it and also because of the brutal honesty with which he treats his childhood and family. It is this very un-Indian trait of baring all, spots, blemishes et al, that sets this book apart.

Moraes covers his complex relationship with his mentally unstable mother over the years in a thoroughly evocative way. His misadventures with women are also endearingly covered. The narrative is in form of a string of defining episodes from his life and hence there are never any dreary patches, as only what was worth remembering has been recorded.

In the course of his impressionable childhood Dom meets a galaxy of illustrious personalities of the time, from Gandhi to Sukarno. It is these interactions which make this book un-put-downable. Although the coming to age stereotype rarely works, Dom with his fluid writing style makes one feel privy to the thoughts, needs and desires of the poet in the making.

The book traces his journey from his isolated and troubled childhood to the start of his poetic endeavours in the Western world, when he reaches England to study at Oxford. Once there, Moraes is fortunate enough to befriend personalities such as Stephen Spender, Freud, Eliot, Francis Bacon among others.

The final leg of his journey traces a full circle to when he himself becomes a father. There are a multiple threads of interest all throughout the narrative. The birth and growth of the man and the poet. A lifetime spent meeting living greatness of the time. A succession of wandering and aimless yet poignant travel. And most importantly one man's dedication to his craft.

Moraes is one of the few Indian authors who had a sustained reputation abroad, a considerable achievement. He is the Bohemian author Indian literature in English lacks so dearly today. If anything bad can be said about this book, it is that at the end of a thoroughly satisfying read one is left thirsting for more. A self confessed tippler I am sure Dom would have raised a glass to that.