Bharkeelay Sholay

At an event at SZABIST called 'CARNIMUN' there was a stall that one couldn't miss even if it were seen from a distance. The stall displayed wooden crates being used in there finest form.

With paint, skill and imagination a bunch of architect majors from Indus Valley came up with an idea and named themselves, 'Bharkeelay Sholay.'

On inquiry I found that they were collecting money to go to Prague, to do an internship related to their field. It was amazing to see how hard they worked and how fast too! These pieces are made by using staple pins, jute rope, discarded wood crates & paint. One can get a ready made piece or even a personalized one. Orders can be made by emailing them and visiting them on their facebook page. What is great about them is that they don't sell at unbelievably high prices, and knowing that the money will help them excel in their field of work is an added insentive for the buyer, I believe.

Bharkeelay Sholay, I wish you the best of luck!

  

The Social Network (Movie Review)

The very awaited movie 'The Social Network' is a story about the people behind the social networking site, Facebook. 

Facebook is obviously one of the most important social netwoking sites to date, from keeping in touch with friends to sending invites to getting the feel of building your own farm even!

This movie was interesting because it gives the viewers a look into the background work that was done into making Facebook. Anyone who is fimiliar with the workings of facebook will find the movie interesting and will be able to relate to the objectives with what the site was made for. 

The only criticism for the movie is that sometimes the dialogues were full of all these technological terms that only maybe computer whiz's can comprehend. Even in the movie itself, Eduardo Saverin, the co-founder of Facebook played by Andrew Garfield gets confused with the tech-talk.

But all in all it was an interesting movie that takes the viewer into the world behind the wall-to-wall, the likes, the add a friend and poking bit. 

"You dont get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies." is the thought provoking tag line of the movie. Mark Zuckerberg & Eduardo Saverin, to hell with those enemies, you made facebook happen! 

Inception

Inception I believe was slightly over-rated. Yes it was undoubtedly a very interesting movie but not as amazing as was being propogated. After the Dark Knight, Christopher Nolan, has without a doubt explored his directive talents but the Dark Knight personally will always be two steps ahead of Inception.

Leonardo Dicaprio wasn’t given the opportunity to fully show his talent as an actor in the movie. After movies like Goodwill Hunting and Titanic, a lot is expected of him and should rightly be so.

Ellen Page, the actress from Juno, truly shows her talent in the movie. She plays a similar role as far as the attitude is concerned similar to Juno however plays a more mature character.

The movie is about a group who invades human minds through their dreams by using various technological devices. The graphics in the movie were brilliant. The movie highlights the idea of how the unconscious mind has information about you that you may very well be unaware of. 

Its definitely a watch and that to at the cinema, 3D would put the icing on the cake.  

Sheema Kermani Who?

Sheema Kermani is a classical dancer, teacher, drama artist and women’s rights activist. I have always been a big fan, since I’ve known about her; because she represents change, innovation and challenges the mainstream culture of Pakistan. Till date, dance isn’t acceptable wholeheartedly, there will always be those 10 people in a crowd of 15 who will object or frown upon it. And what’s amazing is that she has been dancing and performing since the time of Zia-ul-Haq. No joke. And it amazes me how being a woman in a society like ours she was able to go against the narrow minds that prevailed then and still linger now in an attempt to shed light upon a bigger picture.

On researching I found that there is so much more to her that is admirable then just the fact that she is in the true sense an innovator. The beauty in it all is how she doesn’t need a political backing, she doesn’t need an audience full of the elite class and she sure doesn’t need a gun to change minds; because her weapon is the stage and her ammunition is her performance on that stage. 

Sheema Kermani has lived in Delhi and studied the classical forms of Bharatanatyam, Odissi and Kathak dance. She gives many talks, workshops and lecture demonstrations on the history, significance, beauty and importance of this form of art which in turn has helped in its awareness and acceptance. In 2005, Kermani was nominated as one of the “1000 Peace Women from across the Globe”, for the Nobel peace Prize. 

She started working for peace and joined the anti-war movement in the late sixties and initially started her fight for women’s rights by organizing female factory workers and opened women's literacy and day-care centers at textile mills. On realizing that, that was not enough, she formed a group called ‘Tehrik-e-Niswan’ (The Women’s Movement) in 1979 which comprised of women from all walks of life. The purpose of the group was to address human rights and especially the rights of women. They started off with workshops but realized that, what was needed were cultural changes and hence staged plays addressing women and their oppression in all forms. They began raising awareness through the use of dance and the performing arts. Her troupe performs plays on social ills in low income urban and rural communities that touch on taboo topics, including domestic violence, rape, child molestation, the fate of unmarried women, and the importance of education for girls. In addition to working for women’s empowerment, Tehrik-e-Niswan also performs plays to portray their dislike for war. 

I happen to be a strong believer of the arts, in all forms. Be it dance, music, drama, literature or paintings, they all are dangerous because they change minds, they influence, they ignite and empower. And Sheema Kermani embraces this fact and uses it positively to change the lives of the unaware through her performances.

 

Erasing

Memories don’t necessarily have to be about someone you’ve dated or have been married to, it can be related to anything in your life. Think for a second, if you lost that memory, that thought, the one you really want to let go of because the thought of it hurts, if you woke up one day and forgot about it completely, would it change who you are? 

These memories are an important part of your life, if it’s a bad memory you remember it, and learn from it, and if it’s a good memory, you smile at the thought of it. You may not realize it until its gone. In ‘The eternal sunshine of the spotless mind’ the writer wants to explain the feeling of losing the memories, and how it changes your life once you lose them. He explains the importance of memory by showing the fictional process of the erase-al of memory. We can’t really erase our memory or even a part of it, and that for us is the sad sorry truth, how we wish sometimes to have something that could help us erase it;  he shows us how even having that done can be very painful.

The Eternal Sunshine of the spotless has been writted by Charlie Kaufman and
Pierre Bismuth and directed by Michel Gondry. It has won the Oscar in 2005 and won and been nominated for many other prestigious awards.

The movie rotates around 5 characters, Kate Winslet as Clamentine, Jim Carrey as Joel, Kirsten Dunst as Mary, Elijah Wood as Patrick and Tom Wilkinson as Dr. Howard Mierzwiak.  It revolves around Joel's reflections of love while they were being erased. The movie was intense, required absolute and undivided attention. The scenes constantly changed from the present time to the past and even took us to a world of imagination.

“Be careful for what you wish for,” cliché much? It’s true.

The Other Guys

The other guys is a hilarious movie about two partners in the police force who get involved in a situation which was unexpected and get recognition never deemed possible for the ‘loser’ label they have been given.

Dwayne Johnson, the Rock, is in the beginning of the movie, he wasn’t on the poster so his unexpected appearance was intriguing and kept the audience watching.

The movie has been written by Adam McKay and Chris Henchy and Directed by Adam Mckay. Will Farell and Mark Wahlberg perform brilliantly and are absolutely hilarious. The marital relationship between Mark Wahlberg and Eva Mendes were the cause of numerous laughing fits throughout the movie.

All in all, the movie was a work of brilliance in the line of comedy and action.

The Negritude Movement

  The literary word is a powerful device; it can change minds, cause, prevent or resolve wars, and bring about revolutions. Hence, the literary word is seen as a threat. The power a word generates is undoubtedly alarming. As Manly Hall has said: "Words are potent weapons for all causes, good or bad." The beauty in this movement is that it has no end; its realms exist amongst us till today.

The Negritude Movement was a francophone literary movement that took place in the 1930’s in which Black writers living in Paris came together to protest against the French colonial rule, the policy of integration and in order to assert their identity. The movement comprised of the rejection of European colonization, to reinforce pride in being black, and to evoke African values and culture. The movement’s leading figures were Leopold Sedar Senghor, Leon Damas and Aime Cesaire.

The term ‘Negritude’ was coined by Cesaire in his poem ‘Cahier d’un retour au pays natal’ and according to him it means "the simple recognition of the fact that one is black, the acceptance of this fact and of our destiny as blacks, of our history and culture."

The Negritude movement I believe marks a very important part in history. In sociology we learn how Marx came up with a theory that through a process of alienation the proletariat would realize that they are being exploited by the bourgeois. Similarly, this movement occurred when the black felt alienated from their surroundings and realized that this integration of European culture with theirs would eventually eradicate their culture completely, and make the assumption that Black people have no history, true. Additionally, the realization which occurred after observing history and all the humiliation, torture, oppression and suffering their ancestors had borne could have been another reason for the movement. Furthermore, observing the role black people played in the world wars could’ve upset the black community because these black people weren’t only forced to fight in wars they knew little or had nothing to do with but were treated badly during the wars as well.

Also, I believe the realization that being viewed as an inferior race was having a psychological impact on the black community; this was alarming because this would only serve as a loss to the community as a whole. Thus, a movement took place to stop this from happening. See, once some people figure it all out, they want to extend their knowledge onto the masses of their kind and what better way than to use the literary word?
Hence, they used the literary word in order to reach out to the roots of the black culture and to promote a new vision for the black population to adopt. It comprised of black culture, black values, norms, and reinforced a feeling of pride and dignity in being black. The Negritude movement I believe responded to the alienation the blacks had witnessed in the past and hence a sense of realization. Through the rejection of the concept of colonialism, by highlighting the impact colonization had on the black community and by celebrating black identity, the negritude movement serves as an impactful movement till date.

In the negritude movement, the writers did not use indigenous languages; they used French and other languages. However, the impact of the negritude movement on writers like Chineu Achebe, enabled them not only to write about post-colonialism and the impact of colonialism but also write it in the pidgin lauguage, the indigenous language, as Chinua Achebe does in his book ‘Anthills of the Savannah.’

This movement may have influenced black people back then, but today it also shows a ray of light for the other parts of the world that have been colonized and that they too can come up with such a movement where penning down thoughts and ideas could help make people realize how amazing they are and encourage them to be comfortable in their own skin.

There is no clear date that clearly states when the movement ended, perhaps because it probably never did. That’s the beauty of literature, the written word never seems to fade away, you go to a library and can read books that are decades old and they may influence you with the intention they were written with or may enlighten the thought for a revolution.

Literature as we can see has had a huge impact on the way black people have come to view themselves, then and even today. The greatness of the literary word is that it connects people from different regions, like take the leaders of the Harlem Renaissance and the Negritude Movement. One movement was taking place in New York and the other in France however what connected the two was the thought of being ripped off of their roots, which was in turn penned down by the various leaders of the two different movements. These writings were read, influenced, and still influence man. We can see the result of these movements in texts, movies, music, dance, and even paintings.