Filed under: Anecdota
Yesterday, on my way back home from school via the grocery, I was just about to cross the usually quiet intersection near my apartment when I witnessed two cars avoid a crash by a mere second. I felt my heart jump, as one of the cars braked to a screeching halt. And then I noticed that both of the cars were being driven by mothers, each with a young child on her backseat. Without thinking too much about which of the two was to “blame,” although the woman who braked had shot both her hands up from the wheel and yelled inaudibly in apparent shock and anger, I couldn’t help but ponder the what-could-have-happened. A big factor in that equation is of course what we call time. Every second in time is a fork in the road, and even as we go down one path, we are haunted by the other. It is through this metaphor that I’m trying to make sense of my mental response to this (non)-event, both immediately and afterward.
Thinking now about some of this reminds me of another time that I distinctly remember my heart jumping, and that was from a near-death experience years ago when some relatives and I were in an SUV that barely avoided a head-on collision with a bus. There was still an impact, just not face-to-face, thanks to a split-second decision by our driver to actually veer off the road–which in itself was somewhat tricky because we happened to be on a small bridge over a stream. For years since, I have to tried hard to recover a trace of what it was that crossed my mind as we sat there in the car, sure of death and looking straight through the windshield at the huge bus about to come upon us. The only useful explanation I have been able to invoke is that of weightlessness: the feeling one has inside a fast-descending elevator in a skyscraper, or the feeling I imagine one has when bungee-jumping. But I am speaking, of course, of a mental weightlessness, not physical.
They say that in the moment of death, as time comes to a decisive halt, one has a flashback of one’s entire life. But alas, we will never know if that really happens. For in that case, there is no what-could-have-been.
Filed under: Cinemático
Since Slumdog Millionaire has been talked about so much since it made its way to the Oscars, thought I’d share some thoughts here in light of their spectacular win last Sunday. I hadn’t heard of it even a day before I first went to watch it, but found a very positive review through google when some friends asked if I wanted to go check it out. Well, we eventually couldn’t, becuase it was the day after realease and was all sold out at at our small neighborhood theater where they only show foreign and indie films. By the time I got to watch it about a week later at the big main theater in Boston, everyone was raving about how awesome it is.
I’m not gonna lie: I loved it. So much so, and especially the music, that I came out dancing. It was a bit of a shock, because the movie departs so much from the kind that I like. One of my friends was not too impressed; she complained how unrealistic it was. True, the whole melodrama is pretty fantastical. But then another friend pointed out that it was precisely the remarkably realistic portrayal of Mumbai that made the film so touching. So there we go: the tricky balance of the believable and the mandatory suspension of belief that every literary project must pursue.
But here are the more interesting questions, ones that people have been debating about all over: what to do about a film that has been hailed as representing India to the world, but was actually made by a group of British filmmakers. What about those Indians who were (and some still are) protesting that the film fetishizes on poverty, and paints a picture of India as a third-world developing country, without showing the “real,” “modern” Mumbai. (more…)
Filed under: Islamica
The account on masudblog.com (thanks thabet for link) of an exchange on Facebook about the meaning of the hadith advising Muslims against emulating the Other reminded me of a number of issues I have been thinking of lately. Mas’ud’s questions, “does a single Islamic Culture exist?”, relates immediately to the heart of some of my concerns. In many ways, it shouldn’t be surprising that the elusive myth of an Islamic Culture continues to be evoked again and again (I couldn’t possibly recount how many times I have had this discussion with various friends and family). The thing is, Islam as (a) religion must necessitate this question (of whether there is an Islamic Culture): because it is precisely in the nature of religion to straddle the tension between the particular and the universal. I hope to think and write more about this tension, as part of an effort to understand what it is about a religion that makes it a religion–or really, what is it about a human person that makes him/her human.
But for now, let’s also think about some of the unquestioned elements of this debate. For instance, what do we really mean by “culture”? I’m not sure if we can so easily take for granted the set of things we refer to using this highly ambiguous term. The other thing that intrigues me is the distinction between culture and religion. Mas’ud suggests that “Indo-Pak mosques have borrowed from culturally ‘Hindu’ (as opposed to religiously Hindu) art and craft.” While I understand the basic import of this claim, I think we also can, and perhaps should, problematize the fine line between the cultural and the religious (And, to probe this further, we must wonder if and how this distinction was non-existent and meaningless in Indian society before the arrival of the Muslims or the Europeans). Of course, it is precisely these ambiguities that give rise to the continuing debates between Muslims themselves, such that one considers haram what someone else might consider halal. The recent controversy in Malaysia regarding yoga is an instance of such debate.
