The Tyranny of Limited Release

As a movie buff, I have often chafed at the tyranny of limited release of certain movies. Until now I have suffered in silence but no more. I call upon all my fellow cinema-goers not living in New York and Los Angeles (always the only two cities where "limited release" movies are first , well, released) to rise in mass protest at this archaic, humiliating and downright stupid practice by studio honchos and their evil marketers.

My outrage has boiled over because I have to wait two more weeks before I can see "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy" in San Jose, California, the soul of Silicon Valley.

Who decides which cities to release cerebral, unconventional movies first? There is absolutely no data to suggest that New Yorkers and Angelenos are among the most discerning of moviegoers. Nor is there any proof that, financially (the only criterion that matters to film producers and distributors), New York and Los Angeles represent the best markets. Yet this practice of limited release continues as if it is an infallible pillar of our democracy!

What I find most infuriating is the biting, insulting, condescending tag attached to a limited release movie: "Wider Release to Follow." Oh really? Thanks a lot for letting us know. We bumpkins should be grateful that our chance will come only after the sophisticates of New York and Los Angeles have had a chance to view the movie and discuss its merits and demerits casually over coffee.

Here is the "limited release" schedule for le Carre's thriller: "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy opens this week (December 9) in New York and Los Angeles; Dec. 16 in Boston, Chicago, San Francisco and Washington; and Dec. 23 in Dallas, Denver, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, Ore., St. Louis, San Diego, San Jose, Calif., Seattle and Austin, Texas, with wider release to follow."

I saw the magnificent BBC production of "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" in 1979. I watched it with my newlywed wife who had no stomach for thrillers but who fell in love with this one. George Smiley is as unforgettable in his way as Sherlock Holmes was when I discovered the genius of 221B Baker Street as a kid. I think le Carre is the supreme practitioner in his field. His portrayal of the dark and brutal underpinnings of the cold war is without parallel. Hence my infinite interest in seeing this remake of his masterpiece three decades later.

What brought me to my bursting point was le Carre's own take on the movie: "Once in a lifetime, if a novelist is very lucky, he gets a movie made of one of his books that has its own life and truth. This is the achievement of Tomas Alfredson and his team. Yet I have been asked if an American audience — accustomed to the speed and dash of most movie-making today — will have the concentration span needed to follow an intelligently paced narrative of some complexity? I believe that audiences are far better at doing this than film-makers give them credit for. This is a movie that entertains superbly and thrillingly at its own pace and rhythm — a hypnotic movie that takes you over completely. I don’t believe that any audience, once introduced to it, will be able to take its eyes off the screen.In profound ways, it is touching and often alarming. In less profound ways, it is exciting and occasionally very funny. Its complexities are a pleasure to share, and the more so since the movie gently explains them and delivers a satisfying dénouement.It is a work of art that stays with you, as good works of art do."

Can any movie buff remain still after this? Can you blame me, or any of my fellow sufferers in Silicon Valley, if we were to march down Main Street in protest at this outrageous injustice, this injustice of having to wait for two more weeks to see "TTSP" in our beloved San Jose?

"Why don't you go to San Francisco next week," you may say, "or even to Los Angeles for today's viewing, if you are such an aficionado? People drive to LA every day!"

We will do no such thing as a matter of principle. We will see movies in our own town and in no other. Going to see movies in other cities because it is not available in ours is the hallmark of an unfaithful and shallow human being.

But the producers and the distributors of movies have to shape up, and they better shape up quickly. We will launch mass movements if the tyranny of "limited release" is not lifted before the end of 2011. That's a promise.

Joe Frazier (1944-2011)

I remember the "Fight of the Century" vividly not because it was the most anticipated bout in boxing history until then but because I (along with another 70 million people) was in existential danger. The date was March 9, 1971 (March 8 in New York). The Pakistani army had put a stranglehold on East Pakistan, later to become Bangladesh. There were aerial bombardments day and night and the Pakistani army would soon launch a genocide against unarmed Bangladeshis. I had taken shelter in a friend's house on that day but in spite of the danger around me, I was listening intently to the BBC's running commentary on an epic battle taking place in distant New York.

My hero, Muhammad Ali, was fighting the pretender to the throne, a ferocious fighter named Joe Frazier. I had no doubt that Ali would win. How could this fearless pugilist, who had galvanized the world's downtrodden and the oppressed and who spoke truth to power so boldly, lose?

But the unthinkable happened. Ali lost. With his relentless attack, Frazier had apparently worn Ali down. I carried the hurt with me for several days until the genocide by the Pakistani army made everything else insignificant.

Bangaldesh had become an independent nation in December of 1971. In August of 1974, I found myself in Philadelphia as a graduate student at Temple University. By then, I had seen the "fight of the century" dozens of times on TV. One day, on a lark, I called up Frazier's gym in North Philly. Frazier was preparing for a fight (I think it was with Joe Bugner) and the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that his sparring sessions were open to the public. I wanted to see him in action. An assistant answered and gave me the time of the session.

I took the subway and suddenly there was the man himself, throwing punches at his sparring partners. In person, he looked rather small but there was no mistaking his intent, which was to tear off his opponent's head. The ring looked too small to contain his ferocity.

After the sessions, Frazier was all smiles and mingled with the onlookers. I remember the scene after all these years.

Ali and Frazier fought two more times, including the classic "Thrilla in Manila", and Ali avenged himself by winning both times.

Boxing fans knew that if Frazier ran into a bigger version of himself, he would be defeated. That's what happened with George Foreman who punished him mercilessly in their two bouts, although Frazier gave a better account of himself in the second bout than in the first.

Frazier nursed the psychological hurt that Ali inflicted on him and apparently took the hurt to his grave. That's unfortunate. On learning of his nemesis's death, Ali said, “The world has lost a great champion. I will always remember Joe with respect and admiration.”

It would have been wonderful if Ali and Frazier had reconciled in public. Both brought out the best boxing skills in each other and both helped each other reach the summit of pugilistic excellence. But a correction is in order in the wake of all the glorification of Frazier now that he has moved on. Contrary to what some sports writers are saying or have said, Ali was the better boxer but even more importantly, the better human being. If we are defined by the challenges we take on in life, there just is no comparison. That in no way diminishes the fundamental goodness of Frazier.

Rest in peace, Joe.

The Arab World After Gadhafi

The flag of freedom flies high across Libya today. After only eight months, Libyan fighters liberated their country from Moammar Gadhafi, a tyrant who had waged war against his people for more than four decades.

Celebrations have rightly broken out in the public squares and plazas of Libya, but this happiness must be tempered by the momentous tasks that lie ahead for the Transitional National Council and for Libyans themselves. It will not be easy to build a just and tolerant society overnight in a country that did not experience the rule of law for 42 years. But the march must begin, even if the journey is long and arduous.

What happens in Libya has profound implications for an Arab world in flux. If Libyans can lay the foundation of an open and democratic society within the context of their tradition and renounce retribution in favor of rebuilding, neighboring Arab countries can rid themselves of their dinosaurs as well and move confidently toward an enlightened future. There will undoubtedly be mistakes and setbacks. Tribal animosities may flare. (The recent massacre of Egyptian Christians shows how horribly things can go wrong). But if the national council can forge a representative government, there is no limit to what the long-suffering Arab people can accomplish.

In a country of only 6 million, Libya was earning hundreds of millions of dollars from 1.6 million barrels of oil a day. But Gadhafi squandered it all. While the masses lived on crumbs, he lavished wealth and patronage on himself, his family and his sycophants, even as he stirred up trouble abroad. He had his gaudy uniforms, for instance, tailored in Paris. He justified these excesses by making his inane “The Green Book” the de facto constitution of Libya. Under his dictatorship, Libyans, with 0.27 barrels of oil per citizen per day, became poorer on the average than Mexicans, while the average Emirati (UAE), on 0.34 barrels of oil per citizen per day, became richer than the average American.

But that is now past. If Libyan leaders can quickly repair damages to the pipelines and ramp up oil production, it is estimated that the country can start earning as much as $80 million per day at today’s price. It will ease the way toward economic justice for ordinary Libyans. The government will need billions of dollars to steer their country toward the modern age but it has to be cautious because the vultures are already circling.

While Libya scrambles to put its political and economic houses in order, Arabs beyond Libya are rejoicing as well.

One Arab leader, in particular, has been put on notice: Syria’s Bashar Assad. This dictator has been receiving master lessons from Gadhafi on how to put down mass uprisings. Now that his hero has been dispatched after being dragged from a rat hole, Assad must be wondering about his own fate. He, along with Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh, knows that tyrannies are doomed, that hereditary power is history. Syrians and Yemenis are emboldened by the feat of the Libyans and will go all out to overthrow their despots, despite the terrible sacrifices they will undoubtedly have to make.

The larger issue is one of a renaissance in the Arab world. In a sense, the entire Arab world has been caught in a knowledge time-warp for decades. Despite earning trillions of petro-dollars, there has been no world-class discovery or invention from this part of the world in recent times due to bad governance, misplaced priorities and politicized religion. Yet we know that the Golden Age of the Arabs from the 9th through the 13th centuries brought about major advances in mathematics, science, and medicine. Muslim scientists invented algebra, explained principles of optics, demonstrated the body's circulation of blood, named stars, built observatories and created universities.

The situation today? Here is one grim statistics: the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), with 57 member states, claims only 8.5 scientists, engineers, and technicians per 1000 population, compared with a world average of 40.7, and 139.3 for countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).

It is possible that as freedom flowers and representative governments take shape in these countries, a new generation of young people will rise to meet the challenges of the 21st century in science, art and technology.

The Gadhafis and the Assads of the world pour poison on the aspirations of their people. They keep them chained to the dark impulses of the soul. As equality, justice, dignity and freedom blossom among Arabs, can a renaissance be far behind?

Thoreau and the "Occupy Wall Street" Movement

What would Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) make of the “Occupy Wall Street” (OWS) movement now sweeping America and the world?

Based on how he lived and what he wrote, it is likely that the author of Civil Disobedience (1849), whose words inspired Tolstoy, Gandhi and Martin Luther King, would throw his full support behind it.

Thoreau defended John Brown when the abolitionist seized a federal armory in 1859 to arm slaves to rise against the South. He built his own cabin by Walden Pond without borrowing a cent from the bank. He had observed how the crushing burden of mortgages robbed his neighbors of their economic freedom. “When the farmer has got his house,” he wrote in Walden, “he may not be the richer but the poorer for it, and it be the house that has got him.”

If Thoreau were to review the “State of the Union,” these are some of the grim statistics he would encounter in America today:

- The richest 1 percent (the One Percenters) take home almost 25% of the national income, which represents a more unequal wealth distribution than most of the world’s banana republics.

- From 1980 to 2005, more than 80% of the total increase in incomes went to the One Percenters. They now have more net worth (34%) than the bottom 90 percent (29%), according to figures compiled by the Economic Policy Institute in Washington.

- According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, over 14 million Americans (9.1%) are unemployed as of September 2011. (This does not include the significant number of Americans who have given up looking for jobs, particularly those over 50). About as many Americans are working only part-time because they are unable to find full-time work.

- 46.2 million Americans are living in poverty, the most in more than 50 years. Foreclosures and bankruptcies are at an all-time high. Over 50 million Americans do not have any medical insurance.

- The CEOs of the largest American companies earn an average of more than 500 times as much as the average worker.

In New York, the epicenter of the OWS protest, the wealth of the One Percenters derives almost entirely from the sector known primarily for its “financial innovation.” These “innovators” work in Wall Street, commercial and investment banks, hedge funds and credit card and insurance companies. They create nothing. Instead, they claim to create “value” by speculating with others’ money, be it in mortgages, car loans, credit card debt, gas and food prices, always hedging the bets so that they end up with piles of cash whether society wins (rarely) or loses (almost always).

Thoreau would find that in the America of today, the One Percenters control the rest of the population, the Ninetynine Percenters, through economic and political hegemony. He would find that our government has become a government of the One Percenters, by the One Percenters, and for the One Percenters. He would be deeply disappointed with President Obama who promised to clean up the economic disaster he inherited from George Bush. Obama vowed to be an agent of change, a beacon of hope. Instead, he coddled those responsible for the meltdown - bankers, hedge fund operators, reckless speculators and other assorted wealthy sociopaths - and bailed them out with billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money, while turning a blind eye to their uninterrupted multi-million dollar quarterly bonuses.

But Thoreau would also be heartened by the sight of his moral descendants taking a stand. What began as a small gathering by a handful of New Yorkers on September 17 has spread not only coast to coast but beyond, including cities like Rome, London, Paris, Frankfurt, Madrid, Sydney and Tokyo. Like the Arab Spring, this grassroots movement has no leaders, heroes or ideologues, only ordinary citizens bound by a fierce desire to right the terrifying inequity that threatens that most fundamental of rights, our freedom.

Seeing the resolve of protesters growing by the day, Thoreau would reconsider deleting from Walden, circa 2011, his biting observation that the “mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation.” Occupy Wall Street movement is drawing the “mass of men” into an ever-widening circle of passionate activism. Yes, the movement grew from the desperation of intolerable injustice but now it has acquired a momentum that transcends desperation, charging the national and international discourse with timeless ideas of equality, fairness and justice.

“We are the 99” is a banner that Henry David Thoreau would have been proud to unfurl on Main Street, America, for the world to behold and act upon.

A Persistent and Visionary Entrepreneur

No one realized the confluence of technology, entertainment and design in digital products and transformed them into objects of desire more than Steve Jobs. The co-founder of Apple, who passed away at 56 from pancreatic cancer, will be remembered for his seminal contributions to technology with such products and entities as the Macintosh (1984), Pixar (1986), iMac (1998), Mac OS X (2000), iPod (2001), iTunes Store (2003), iPhone (2007), MacBook Air (2008), and iPad (2010). The list is long and unique and sets him apart from other tech innovators who were lucky to hit the bull’s eye with one or two products.

In technology, Jobs believed in revolution, not evolution. His obsession with the look and feel of a product down to the last excruciating detail often rubbed his underlings and executives the wrong way. He could be cruel with criticism and brutal in his appraisal of others. But in the end, everyone who worked for him and was influenced by him became his fierce acolytes. When relentless excellence is the goal, walking on eggshells is not a priority.

Jobs was an anomaly in that he extolled the value of a liberal arts education when only STEM subjects (Science, Technology, Engineering, Math) were (and are) held up as the gateway to employability. Before dropping out of college at 17, the only course he found satisfying was one on calligraphy, an experience he later used in creating graceful fonts for the Macintosh.

Jobs was neither a software nor a hardware engineer but he was the quintessential catalyst who made the whole greater than the sum of its parts. He created products from the user’s perspective, not the geek’s or the executive’s. The mouse, the user interface, the built-in network, the playful and friendly computers, these innovations and more were designed with you and me in mind. He made the computer truly personal.

All these raise an intriguing question: Where did this unique synthesis of art and science come from? Perhaps the clue lies in genealogy, although the story is suffused with sadness.

Steven Paul Jobs was born out of wedlock to a 23-year-old Syrian Muslim immigrant from Wisconsin named Abdul Fattah Jandali and his 23-year-old German-American girlfriend named Joanne Schieble. In the conservative America of 1955, the baby didn’t stand a chance of growing up with his biological parents, particularly considering that his mother came from an ultra-orthodox Christian family.

Joanne Schieble couldn’t convince her parents of marrying an Arab Muslim and so moved to liberal San Francisco. Although the couple formally married later, Joanne put up the baby for adoption without letting Jandali know about it.

The Arab-American boy was adopted by an American-Armenian family in the San Francisco Bay Area. Clara Hagopian and her husband Paul Jobs had been married for seven years. She was incapable of conceiving, so the couple eagerly adopted the baby who was to change the world in unimaginable ways.

Jobs never showed any interest in knowing his biological father. In August of 2011, Jandali, now 80 and a vice-president of a Casino in Reno, Nevada, (he has said that he is not a practicing Muslim but that he is proud of his Islamic heritage) publicly reached out to his son, saying, “I live in the hope that before it is too late he will reach out to me. Even to have just one cup of coffee with him just once will make me a very happy man.”

While there was no reconciliation, is it not possible that the confluence of the East and the West played a decisive role in shaping Jobs into who he was? The keen eye for aesthetics, the flair for technology, the uncanny ability to sense the potential in people and mold them into a never-ending source of creativity, probably came from this mix of two distinct bloodstreams.

Technology has a way of making today’s hottest products obsolete tomorrow. A new Jobs may appear out of the blue to create products that make the iPhones and the iPads look positively arcane.

But even if the digital revolution that Jobs spawned is supplanted by another, there is something else that he produced, or rather wrote, that I believe will stand the test of time. It is the commencement speech that he delivered at Stanford University in 2005.

It is among the most stirring and inspiring addresses ever, dealing with the fragility of life, the power of persistence, the elixir of creativity, and the inevitability of death. Everyone I know who has read it has been profoundly moved by it and resolved to make something of their lives.

“Your time is limited,” he said in conclusion in that address, “so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma – which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinion drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”

Steve Jobs lived his own life. He moved confidently in the direction of his dreams and passions, relentlessly focused on his goals while never letting failures (and he had quite a few) daunt him. There are lessons in it for all.

A Perspective on the 9/11 Attacks

A week after the 9/11 attacks in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania, my doorbell rang one evening. Gail, my neighbor and a devout Christian, stood apologetically, sorrow etched on her face. “I brought this for you,” she said. It was a miniature marble mosque with a golden dome. “I searched all over the Internet for it. Just wanted you to know we are with you and your family.”

I knew instantly where she was coming from. American Muslims were under siege. That’s how it felt in the immediate wake of the fall of the twin towers. My neighbor was trying to put me at ease. The same scene was playing out all over the country. Concerned neighbors and coworkers who had known Muslims in their midst were offering moral support against insults, injuries and death threats by a minority of Americans who equated us with the murderous fanatics who rained death and destruction on that serene Autumn day. For every American who shot at Muslims, hurled insults and splattered pig blood on mosque doors, however, there were several who threw a protective shield around us. The police were deployed to safeguard mosques. Christian and Jewish women wore hijab to accompany Muslim women on their errands. Interfaith dialogues sprouted everywhere and leaders demanded that citizens abide by the law.

But the besieged feeling persisted. Fox and other right-wing media outlets openly questioned our loyalty, accusing us of being a fifth column. Muslims who were coming of age in 2001 reacted to this onslaught in one of two ways: many embraced the faith more strongly while some were intimidated enough to abandon it. The shrill anti-Muslim voices rose and fell over the years and now, ten years later, they have metastasized into well-funded Islamophobia with the rise of the Tea party and the more extreme elements of the Republican Party. One consequence has been that most Muslims have come out of their cocoons and are engaging with the larger American society in many more ways than they used to before the 9/11 attacks. A recent Pew Research Center poll is instructive. 48% of American Muslims think the American people are generally friendly toward Muslims, 32% think they are neutral, 16% think they are unfriendly and 4% “don’t know.”

Ten years on, two things about the Sept. 11 attacks stand out.

The first is the rejection by the overwhelming majority of Muslims of al-Qaida and its nihilistic ideology. This murderous fringe group offered nothing but death and destruction. We were able to see through its sophistry and condemned its leaders and foot-soldiers in no uncertain terms, even though Islamophobes claimed that we did not raise our voice against the extremists, a canard if ever there was one. The failure of al-Qaida is evident in the outbreak of the Arab Spring, the revolutions sweeping Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt, Libya and Syria that has already dethroned some entrenched dictators. The uprisings have all been indigenous movements in which al-Qaida played no role whatsoever, an obvious indication of their irrelevance and insignificance.

The second is the catastrophic overreaction of the United States. The war in Afghanistan against the Taliban began in October 7, 2001, and had the support of most nations of the world. But when President George Bush, in concert with his diabolical VP Dick Cheney, decided to launch the Iraq war on false pretenses of weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein’s connection with al-Qaida, America lost its moral bearing and purpose.

I remember joining a demonstration on March 28, 2003, in San Francisco, a week after the war began. About 2,000 Americans from all walks of life gathered to denounce the war - Quakers, Franciscan nuns and monks, Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Muslims and many others. Those who spoke, including one of America’s foremost Islamic scholars, Hamza Yusuf, explained how this was not a war of Islam versus the West but of America waging an unjust, preemptive war against a nation that had nothing to do with 9/11.

Recently, the Nobel economist Joseph E. Stiglitz wrote that President Bush’s response to the attacks “compromised America’s basic principles, undermined its economy, and weakened its security.” Truer words have rarely been written.

A conservative estimate puts America’s bill for fighting the two wars to at least $3.3 trillion, of which about $2 trillion accounts for the Iraq war. To put this in perspective, for every dollar that al-Qaida spent to pull off the Sept. 11 attacks, the cost to the United States has been an astonishing $6.6 million!

The deaths of thousands of Americans and Iraqis, the erosion of values, and the staggering amount of money wasted, constitute one of the darkest chapters in U.S. history. How did values erode? Through repression of civil liberties, partisan definition of patriotism (“last refuge of the scoundrel”), wiretapping of American citizens, surveillance without judicial approval, torture, indefinite imprisonment, docile media acting as presidential mouthpiece, extraordinary rendition, and so on.

On this tenth anniversary of that infamous day, the question is: Did the 9/11 attacks make America weak? The attacks did not, but America’s overreaction and imperial overreach did. It is a lesson America can never afford to ignore.

Libya's Glorious Dawn

Four decades of darkness is finally surrendering to a glorious dawn in Libya. A ragtag band of rebels transformed itself into a fighting force in a mere six months and overran Moammar Gadhafi's last stronghold around Tripoli. Although pockets of resistance remain and snipers loyal to Gadhafi still abound, the swiftness with which the rebels captured most of the capital, coming as it did in the holy month of Ramadan, will surely become the stuff of legend one day. For now, however, freedom lovers everywhere can rejoice that a tyrant has fallen. A song of Yusuf Islam (formerly Cat Stevens) sums up what captive Libyans must be feeling: "Morning has broken, like the first morning. Blackbird has spoken, like the first bird."

Moammar Gadhafi's fall is more momentous than that of Hosni Mubarak. The Egyptian army saw the handwriting on the wall when Tahrir Square erupted with the unflinching resolve of ordinary Egyptians and so wisely acceded to most of their demands. The Nile revolution was peaceful. Not so the Libyan revolution. Gadhafi and his goons made sure of that. The dictator vowed to fight to the last drop of his blood to defend his throne. Of course it was the blood of his loyalists that he was willing to shed, not his or his sons'.

But as the rebels organized themselves and reclaimed their land inch by inch, aided by NATO bombing, naval blockade and American aerial surveillance, the tide began to turn. Gadhafi's initial roar dissolved into a pathetic whimper. When caught, he will most likely face justice at the International Criminal Court in The Hague. Such will increasingly be the fate of despots. Such will be the inevitable fate of Syrian dictator Bashar Assad.

The transformation of Muslim Middle East, though still incomplete, is perhaps the most significant event of the twenty-first century. Its effect will define the course of history in ways that are beyond the comprehension of even the most astute observers. But few signposts can be discerned:

1. Dictatorship in all its forms and manifestations, even the ones under the guise of democracy, is doomed. People who cowered in fear have discovered freedom from fear, a discovery that has gone viral around the world. Today’s invincible autocrat is tomorrow’s cowering prisoner. "A man can be destroyed,” wrote Hemingway, “but not defeated." The architects of the Arab revolution have proven this with their blood.

2. People in power can no longer use religion for political ends, at least not with the ease they were able to in the past. It is a fact that the overwhelming majority of Muslims killed since the Second World War have died at the hands of other Muslims. Invoking bogus threats to torture dissidents and perpetuate dynastic power will no longer work. A significant corollary of this is that more and more Muslims, particularly in the Middle East, will demand the separation of mosque and state.

3. Israel will be forced to confront reality and coexist with Palestinians in a two-state solution. The Muslim Middle East will go through yet more convulsions - tribal and sectarian conflicts will probably raise their ugly heads - before the democratic rule of law, transparency, accountability and enlightened governance take hold. When that happens, and it surely will, Israel will have to recognize that it is a part of the Middle East and not an outpost of "Western Civilization" transplanted in the middle of an alien and backward region. Likewise, extremist organizations from both sides will be marginalized as the benefits of good governance and the moral high ground become evident. In September, Palestinians will seek statehood at the United Nations. The United States will dutifully cast its veto. Such myopic policies will be much harder to justify in the transformed political landscape of the Middle East. In the coming months, the United States will recognize, as it has never recognized before, that “business as usual” in the Middle East will be too detrimental to its interests to be sustainable.

It is not just in the Middle East where the wind of change is blowing. People are rising up everywhere against corruption, injustice and state-sponsored violence. Consider how Anna Hazare, a little-known 74-year-old ascetic and Gandhi-disciple has catalyzed Indians to launch massive protests against corruption in the "world's largest democracy." We are witnessing such scenes everyday, aided by social media, and feel empowered to take our own stand against injustice and oppression.

The world’s epicenter of courage and commitment is now at the Green Square of Tripoli, newly and appropriately renamed Martyrs’ Square. Libyans are determined to rebuild their shattered nation on their own terms. They have made possible what was unthinkable only six months ago. Even though their dawn is tinged with the red of blood, there is no doubt that their land will soon be bathed in the bright sunshine of freedom.

Justice for Syrians

Self-restraint and God-consciousness are the essence of fasting for Muslims in Ramadan, a month in which thirst and hunger can become a source of salvation for the believer. As one of the five pillars of Islam, fasting is mandatory for the rich and the poor, the young and the old, the ruler and the ruled.

Given this, Muslims and indeed, people of conscience everywhere, are trying to fathom the brutality and the bloodshed occurring in Syria now, in which a regime is waging an all-out war against its own people.

On the eve of Ramadan this year, tanks and troops of Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad besieged the city of Hama, killing more than 200 people. The son seems determined to repeat what the father – Hafez al-Assad – did in 1982 when his military killed at least 10,000 people in that city in crushing a revolt.

The anti-government uprising began on March 18 when Syrians, emboldened by the Arab Spring, took to the streets to denounce the four decades of autocratic rule by the Assad dynasty. The Damascus regime first tried to blame foreign conspirators. When that didn’t work, it began fanning the flames of religious and ethnic conflicts. The sectarian plot fizzled as well when it became clear that members of all religious, ethnic groups and clans – Sunnis, Alawites, Kurds, Shias – were united in ousting Assad and his cronies. Protesters calling for national unity held up banners that read, “We are all Syrians and together we demand the ousting of the regime.”

Zagloul, a Syrian-American and a Silicon Valley executive, has just returned from a two-month trip to Damascus. I asked him about the mix of protesters in Syria. “I saw no sectarian divide,” he confirmed. “People from all walks of life and every ethnic background are participating.” He is hopeful that by the end of Ramadan, some dramatic changes for the better will occur in Syria. But he also knows that the situation is dire and the future uncertain.

Dictators resorting to “business as usual” have been helpless against the onrushing tsunami of Internet activism. Live videos and descriptions of the violence in Syria can be found on Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and other social media outlets.

Yet the truth is that the forces of Bashar Assad, led primarily by his two ruthless brothers, Maher and Rifaat, are killing with impunity Syrians in Hama, Homs, Deir al-Zour, Damascus and other cities. They are apparently convinced that international outrage against their atrocities will be no more than lip service. Protesters in the flashpoint city of Hama carried poignant banners that read “Your silence is killing us!”

But activity is beginning to replace passivity. Gulf Arab States – Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar and the United Arab Emirates – have called for stronger sanctions against the Assad regime. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Bahrain have recalled their ambassadors from Syria. King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia has demanded that Bashar Assad “stop the killing machine and end the bloodshed.”

One can argue that the Gulf States are not paragons of freedom themselves and so their call for reform in Syria smacks of hypocrisy. But that would be the wrong stand to take at this juncture when Syrians are dying by the thousands. We must not give in to political or ideological considerations and support any step to stop Assad’s killing machine.

Feras is a marketing consultant in Silicon Valley. He is following the ominous developments in the country of his birth with mounting anxiety. “I have an 85-year-old aunt in Hama,” he told me. “She has never stepped out of her home in the last ten years. But she was forced to flee with her two daughters to a border town when troops began their indiscriminate shelling. On hundred and forty-five of them were packed into a single bus.”

Although Feras has known of Assad’s campaign of terror, the “Ramadan Massacre” has shocked him. “All he cares about is power and his preference for bullets over basic rights.” But Feras is convinced that Syrians have reached a point of no return. “They have nothing to lose. They will win their freedom or they will die. Let’s pray it is the former.”

Feras fervently hopes that the United States, Europe and Middle-Eastern countries will freeze Syria’s assets, just as they did Libya’s. “But the situation is much more complicated in Syria, so NATO-led bombing, as in Libya, is not an option at this time. What will work is international pressure and isolation of the Assad regime.” He is in contact with sources inside Syria. “Every Friday after the Jumah prayers, and after the nightly Ramadan prayers, people gather to plan and organize protests. It is spreading all over, to Damascus, Aleppo, Homs and other cities.”

“Is there a unified opposition party?”

“Syrians have not known freedom for several decades. In Egypt, in spite of the authoritarian regimes, people had well-formed opposition groups with a history of organized protests. Not so in Syria, and so the logistics and the coordination will take some time. But it will happen.”

Human rights groups calculate that over 2,000 Syrians have been killed so far since the pro-democracy demonstrations began in March, not including those who have been tortured but somehow managed to survive. The United Nations Security Council has issued a toothless statement condemning the use of force against civilians but without any threat of sanctions. It also urges “all sides to act with restraint,” as if the protesters are equally to blame for the deaths.

The Council must impose tough sanctions against Syria and lay the groundwork for a war crimes investigation on Assad and his goons for the International Criminal Court in Hague. Likewise, the United States, the European Union, Turkey and the countries that consume Syrian oil – Germany, Italy, France and the Netherlands – must step up pressure on Assad. He has lost all legitimacy and he must go. As Feras put it, “Nothing less will be acceptable to Syrians, particularly after the Ramadan Massacre.”

Nesbo's Norway

An extremist decides that multiculturalism is diluting Norway’s “pure” race and undermining its Christian character and so goes on a rampage. He belongs to a small group of fascists who cannot escape from the prison of Norway’s past and wreaks vengeance on those he considers responsible for selling his country’s soul to the unwashed hordes of immigrants, particularly Muslim immigrants.

Is this a description of the 32-year-old Norwegian Anders Behring Breivik who took the lives of at least 92 people in Oslo and in the island of Utoya?

No, it is the description of the antagonist in Norway’s bestselling writer Jo Nesbo’s 2000 thriller, The Redbreast.

Sometimes the true state of a country is reflected more in the fiction of its perceptive writers than in the facts of its textbooks. Norway is a progressive country that often hosts weighty international conferences, the Oslo Accord of 1993 between Palestine Liberation Organization and Israel being one. Any threat of terrorism in that Nordic country is attributed to “Islamic extremists” and “radical Islam,” simply because it is the easy thing to do. A 2011 report on terrorism concluded that “the far-right and the far-left extremist communities do not represent a serious threat to Norwegian security.”

Don’t these pundits read their fellow Norwegian Jo Nesbo’s books? Can’t they at least allow for the possibility of lethal currents of extremism flowing beneath the placid surface of its seemingly peaceful society?

Harry Hole, the protagonist in Nesbo’s thrillers at one point asks, “what is it with our country?” The cerebral detective is frustrated by the vicious racism he encounters among officers in Oslo’s premier police academy and among obtuse politicians, and his inability to do anything about it.

Now Anders Romarheim, a fellow at the Norwegian Institute for Defense Studies says, “It was international jihadism we feared. What we have now is more painful in terms of a re-evaluation of ourselves.”

When news broke of the horrific killings in Oslo and Utoya, some in the media immediately floated possible links to Muslim extremist organizations, just as they did during the Oklahoma City bombings in 1995. After 9/11, this became so ingrained that we shuddered at the occurrence of mayhem anywhere, reflexively thinking that Muslims were responsible and thanking God when that turned out to be false.

I felt an enormous relief when Mehtab Afsar, the Secretary-General of the Islamic Council of Norway said, “This is our homeland, this is my homeland. I condemn these attacks, and the Islamic Council of Norway condemns these attacks, whoever is behind them.”

It is estimated that there are anywhere from 80,000 to 100,000 Muslims in Norway, about 2% of a population of 5 million. They are mostly Pakistanis, Filipinos, Albanians, Somalis, Turks and Moroccans. Right-wing organizations regularly post virulent and hysterical articles with titles such as “Is Norway Becoming Muslim?” and “Norway is Under Attack by Islam!” Like extremists everywhere, they are in the minority but because of their singular focus on hate and violence, they can cause damage vastly out of proportion to their numbers.

The majority of Norwegians reject the homegrown terrorists and their nihilistic agenda but where they were indifferent to their shadowy presence before, they will now have to be particularly vigilant.

I do not support the labeling of Anders Breivik as a Christian fundamentalist. He is a fundamentalist, a fanatic, a racist, a brother to fundamentalists, fanatics and racists of all persuasions everywhere. That’s who he is and that’s how he must be viewed, and that’s how the Norwegian court must judge him when he stands trial for the cold-blooded murders.

There is too much violence in the world today and no society, culture or nation is exempt from it, as John Nebo’s complex thrillers emphasize. It lies dormant until it suddenly explodes and then horror and shock numb us, forcing us to reevaluate our easy opinions.

For Norwegians who have lost their children to Breivik’s carnage, we offer our prayers and condolences. The sunshine has gone out of their lives and although time is supposed to heal everything, it can rarely heal the anguish of parents who have lost their loved ones to the violence of madmen. Still, we say to them, “We are with you in your sorrow. May peace and acceptance find their way into your hearts and may your children find eternal peace in the presence of their Creator.”

Songs of Rabindranath Tagore

In the charming, leafy town of Pleasanton in Northern California, Bengali-speaking Bay Area residents and their guests recently celebrated the 150th birth anniversary of Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941). There were discussions and documentaries on his life and writings by scholars and professors as well plays and dance dramas (snippets from Shyama, Chitrangada, Chandalika), but for me the draw were the songs. We listen to 'Rabindra Sangeet' all the time but the pleasure of listening to live performances in America is rare. You don't miss the chance when the opportunity arrives.

I came to listen to two of today's leading exponents of Tagore songs. One is from Bangladesh (population 190 million) and the other from West Bengal (population 90 million). As long as there is a single person left in the world whose mother tongue is Bengali, Tagore songs will continue to be sung and listened to. With 250 million and growing, there is no danger of Rabindra Sangeet disappearing anytime soon.

In the program over a recent weekend, the prelude to the main events contained many Tagore songs by local artists as well. I was stunned by their quality. One in particular (Mitali Bhawmik) sang some of the more intricate Tagore songs ('Ananda Dhara Bohiche Bhubane', to name one) with such panache that we rose as one to applaud her. We listened to two songs sung in a modern 'fusion' style by young women to appeal to today's youngsters. The first was a duet: "Ay Tobe Shohochori Hate Hate Dhori Dhori." The other was "Pran Chay Chokkhu Na Chai." The rousing renditions, accompanied by some nifty dance moves, showed how Tagore's music could translate to a contemporary context without losing its magical appeal.

Finally, on Saturday night, Rizwana Choudhury Bonya of Bangladesh took the stage. "Those of you who are from West Bengal where Rabindranath was born (capital - Kolkata) inherited the poet and his creations," she began before presenting us with a bouquet of Tagore songs. "Those of us who are from Bangladesh had to earn Rabindranath." As someone born in Bangladesh, I thought that was as succinct a statement as one could make about the two Banglas.

The songbird then began to sing, opening with "Ogo Tomar Chokkhu Diye." In no time we were transported to a magical world of love and devotion. The inimitable words and lyrics of Rabindranath came alive in her mesmerizing voice. She began with "Ogo Tomar Chokkhu Diye" and chose a combination of familiar and not-so-familiar songs, although the audience began clamoring for the familiar ones midway through the program. "Chinno Patar Bhasahai Toroni Eka Eka Kori Khela" was one of them. She had the audience singing two songs with her: "Jodi Tor Dak Shune Kao Na Ashe" and "Shokhi, Bhabona Kahare Bole." Audience participation is a way to keep the legacy of Tagore alive at the grassroots. She ended with "Kichui To Holona." If you want a glimpse into Tagore's genius, consider that Rabindranath composed this haunting song when he was only 20. The pathos is heartbreaking.

The thing with Rabindra-Sangeet is that anyone can sing them, or at least several of them, but it takes an artist of rare talent to sing them well and elevate them to works of art. Trained in Shanti Niketan under the late great Kanika Bannerjee, she has become the epitome of Tagore songs, the touchstone by which other Tagore singers are measured. When her program ended two hours later, we knew we had just been rewarded with an unforgettable experience.

The following night, it was Srikanata Acharya's turn. This Kolkata artist is known for his versatility. He is as much at home with Tagore songs as with modern Bengali songs. In this, he seems to be following in the footsteps of the late Hemanta Mukherjee who dominated the Bengali music scene for almost half-a-century. Srikanta paid homage to all the artists of the past who brought Tagore's music to the masses, artists such Pankaj Mallick, Shanti Dev Ghosh, Hemanta Mukherjee, Kanika Bannerjee, Suchitra Mitra, Dwijen Mukherjee and Debabrata Biswas. He forgot to mention Chinmoy Chatterjee, an unintentional oversight surely, considering that he frequently sings many Tagore songs ("Prem Eshechillo Nisshobdo Charane," "Tumi Shondhar Meghmala," "Mon Je Bole Chini Chini") often associated with Chinmoy.

Srikanta has a full and expressive voice that helps him interpret Tagore songs with the fluidity they deserve. He introduced many of the songs with recollections by those who were with Rabindranath at the moment of their creation. These included "Jete Jete Ekla Pothe Niveche Mor Bati," and "Gram Chara Oi Rangamatir Poth," among others. He sang until almost midnight and we savored every moment. I have heard him on CDs and YouTube but a live performance where you see and listen to the artist is an unforgettable experience.

Rabindranath had himself observed that even if all his poems, essays, novels, short stories and dance dramas were forgotten, he would still probably be remembered for his songs. How true! And of his songs, he made this supremely democratic statement: "Don't ask who I am presenting my songs to. They lie in the dust by the roadside for anyone to pick up and honor."

And so we do, so we do.

Literature's Enigmatic Encounter: Tagore and Ocampo

In September of 1924, Rabindranath Tagore received an invitation to attend Peru’s commemorative centennial celebration. A hundred years before, led by Simon Bolivar, Peru had defeated Spanish Colonial forces to become an independent nation. Peruvians wanted the Bengali Nobel Laureate to participate in the festivities marking the historical event.

Tagore, 63, had recently returned to India from an exhausting four month trip to China and Japan. He needed rest but with wanderlust in his blood, the poet found the invitation from Peru irresistible. With family members and friends to give him company part of the way, Tagore sailed on the ship Haruna-Maru from Colombo for Europe. The Diary of the Westbound Traveler is a work from this period, along with several poems he composed on the Haruna-Maru.

From France, with Leonard Elmhirst as his secretary, Tagore boarded the Andes bound for Argentina. He had met the idealistic Elmhirst in the United States in 1920. Moved by Tagore’s vision of rural development, Elmhirst had raised money from wealthy American patrons and came to Shantiniketan the following year to organize Rabindranath's village projects.

Tagore fell ill on the Andes within a few days and became bedridden. But the poems kept flowing from his pen – “Stranger,” “Absent-Minded,” “Hope,” “Wind,” “Dream,” “Sea,” and many others. After three weeks at sea, on November 6, the ship docked at Buenos Aires. Flu had severely weakened the poet; further traveling was out of question. Without prolonged rest he would be risking his life, doctors told him. Reluctantly, he had to give up on the invitation from Peru.



The year 1914 was one of the darkest in Victoria Ocampo's life. Two years before, at the age of twenty two, she had married the man of her dream, anticipating a life of respect and love and free from dogma and prejudice. She had reasons to dream, for in Monaco Estrada she thought she had found a sensitive, handsome young man who considered her an equal and approved of her passion for literature and art. Although born into wealth and privilege, she was not immune to the prevailing social custom where women were treated as chattels, a legacy of Spanish Colonialism that was sustained and supported by Argentina's Catholic Church. For a woman yearning to break free from male injustice meant social ostracism and disgrace. The strong willed and impulsive Victoria had felt like a captive even in her parents’ home. Life with Estrada promised freedom and creativity.

Barely had her honeymoon begun when Victoria’s dream was shattered, for the man of her dream turned out to be as just as tyrannical and chauvinistic. She had traded one form of captivity with another. For over a decade Victoria would live through this loveless and sometimes violent marriage, fearful of hurting her parents, until finally one day she summoned the courage to obtain a legal separation.

In 1914, however, she had begun to despair of life. With no one to turn to and none in whom to confide her sorrow, she came across a copy of André Gide’s French translation of Gitanjali, a collection of poems by a Bengali poet named Rabindranath Tagore who had won the Nobel Prize for literature the year before. The depth and beauty of what she read stunned Victoria. The ray of hope emanating from those poems pierced the darkness around her. The spiritual energy in such lines as

... Oh, dip my emptied life into that ocean, plunge it
Into the deepest fullness. Let me for once feel
that lost sweet touch in the allness of the universe ...

lifted her above her personal tragedy. In the illuminating biography, Victoria Ocampo Against the Wind and the Tide, the author Doris Meyer quotes Victoria many years later to describe the effect Tagore's poetry had on her:

"I remember the moment and the exact spot where this took place. I was leaning against a white marble fireplace in a room upholstered in light gray silk. The house no longer exists. Neither do those I was afraid of hurting, or those who were hurting me. Nor does the poet who was bringing me the gift of tears, as not even the closest friend would have been able to do. The images which now live only in my memory will cease to exist together with it, as easily, as irrevocably as all that has preceded them into nothingness.

But the Gitanjali over which I was weeping will remain. "

Not knowing who he was and separated by barriers of language and culture, Tagore nonetheless became her spiritual companion. She had found hope, a reason for living.


That Tagore would pass through Buenos Aires on his way to Peru became known in Argentina in September of 1924. The possibility of meeting in person the poet who had saved her a decade earlier from mental and spiritual abyss could be a momentous event in her life. In preparation, she began reading as much of Tagore's translated works as possible. She had help, for in one of those mysterious ways in which an artist can touch the souls of receptive readers in distant shores, Tagoré had become a major literary figure in South America at the time, due mostly to the translations of his work in Spanish by a remarkable literary couple named Juan Ramón and Zenobia Camprubi, who translated twenty-two books by Tagore between 1914 and 1922. The translations also influenced other major literary figures, including José Ortega y Gassett, a leading Spanish intellectual of the time, Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda in Chile, and Octavio Paz in Mexico.

When the Andes arrived at Buenos Aires on November 6, no one was more prepared to receive Tagore on Argentinean soil than Victoria Ocampo.


Complete rest in Buenos Aires upon embarkation, the doctors had advised Tagore, but where? Victoria was quick to seize the opportunity. Renting a villa named “Miralrio” (River View) in the suburb of San Isidro, not far from the Villa Ocampo where she lived, and selling a diamond tiara as payment, Victoria offered its peace and solitude to Tagore and Elmhirst. Gratefully they accepted. Victoria’s own household staff was to care for Tagore but she was too shy and awestruck to reside in the rented villa herself.

For two months, Tagore convalesced at San Isidro, his home away from home. The villa was situated on the bank of the River Plate and the view from its balcony was spectacular. In Victoria’s own words:

I had instinctively led Tagore to that balcony immediately upon his entering Miralrio, certain that if he was to take anything away on leaving it, it would be this: the memory of the landscape that would meet his eyes morning and evening, with its changing light. That landscape was the only gift worthy of him.

The flowing river and the lush trees and flowers of San Isidro healed Tagore’s body and nourished his spirit. The three of them, Tagore, Victoria, and Elmhirst, took long walks along the bank of the Plate. In Victoria, Rabindranath saw a woman of uncommon beauty and kindness, whose intelligence, sensitivity and spiritual yearning left the deepest impression in the poet. He was thirty years older than her; the odes he wrote to her "Guest," "Fear," and "Last Spring", to name only three were suffused with tenderness and poignancy. Yet there was also a certain tension between the three, as suggested by Elmhirst in a letter written to his fiancée in England:

Our hostess (V.O.) was quite – next to the poet himself – the most difficult person I ever came across … Besides having a keen intellectual understanding of his books, she was in love with him – but instead of being content to build a friendship on the basis of intellect, she was in a hurry to establish the kind of proprietary right over him which he absolutely would not brook … she was a bundle of prides, intellectual, aristocratic, and physical, against which, and their ferocious hold upon her nature, she was constantly at war. For her, then, I was either bridge or barrier, obstacle or convenience as occasion turned out …

During the Tagore birth centenary in 1961 in India, Victoria herself wrote of her relationship with Tagore: “Little by little he partially tamed the young animal, by turns wild and docile, who did not sleep, dog-like, on the floor outside his door, simply because it was not done.”

After two months at San Isidro, Tagore began to feel restless. Driven by an imaginary sense of duty that he was to regret later, he and Elmhirst left Buenos Aires on January 4, 1925 for Europe on board the Julio Cesaro, in staterooms arranged for them by Victoria. But Tagore could not forget her. Memory of Victoria continued to haunt and inspire him in his later years. He composed at least two songs around her: I know you, O maiden from a faraway land! Your dwelling is across the sea ... and On the green bank by the blue sea, I have seen the incomparable while passing by ... From the Julio Cesaro, he wrote to her: “… I believe that your love may help me in my fulfillment … I have lost most of my friends because they asked me for themselves, and when I said I was not free to offer myself, they thought I was proud. I have deeply suffered from this over and over again – and therefore I always feel nervous whenever a new gift of friendship comes in my way. But I accept my destiny and if you also accept it we shall forever remain friends.” And on the eve of his death in 1941, sixteen years after bidding farewell to Victoria in Buenos Aires, he wrote:

"How I wish I could once again find my way to that foreign land where waits for me the message of love! The dreams of yesterday will wing their way back and, fluttering softly, build their nest anew. Sweet memories will restore to the lute its lost melody ... Her language I knew not, but what her eyes said will forever remain eloquent in its anguish. "

Neither could she forget him. Tagore had invited her to visit him in India but time and distance proved insurmountable. Nevertheless, she corresponded regularly with him, meeting him once more in Paris in 1930 where she organized an exhibit to introduce to the art world Tagore’s unusual drawings and sketches she had discovered at San Isidro. She followed India's struggle for independence with keen interest, exchanging lively ideas with him about how to expel the British Raj from the subcontinent. Through it all, she always gratefully acknowledged his deep, steadying influence on her.

Victoria Ocampo went on to become a leader in the movement to secure women’s rights in her country and emerged as a star in the literary circles of Latin America. As an ardent feminist she was clearly ahead of her time. As essayist translator, her work has been compared to the leading twentieth century women of letters. In 1931 she founded the Spanish literary magazine Sur (South). As its editor, guiding spirit and financial backer, she transformed it into the foremost magazine of its kind in Latin America. Through its pages, she launched the career of Jorgé Luis Borges and introduced to her countrymen such writers as Gabriela Mistral, T. S. Eliot, Octavio Paz, André Gide, Aldous Huxley, Albert Camus and many others. By publishing neglected writers and taking on unpopular subjects, her name became synonymous with literary integrity and freedom of thought. She was jailed in 1953 for lashing out against the regime of Juan Peron. International pressure forced the dictator to release her from prison after twenty six days. In 1977 she was elected to the Argentine Academy of Letters, the first woman to be accorded the honor.

The reputation of Argentina’s “Queen of Letters” has grown steadily since her death in 1979 at the age of 88. It is likely that Victoria Ocampo will be remembered long after another Argentine, Eva Peron, has become a footnote in that country’s history.

Tagore composed sixty one poems on his voyage to and from South America in 1924, including twenty six in Argentina that are considered among the most lyrical and evocative of his poems. To these were added sixteen more that he had composed earlier that year and the collection was published as Puravi, which means ‘Easterner’ and is also the name of an evening raga in Indian classical music. To whom did Tagore dedicate Purabi? To “Vijaya,” the Bengali name he chose for the woman “who filled my days abroad with grace and beauty,” Victoria.

Two Movies

You have to have the patience of a tree to enjoy “The Tree of Life.” That’s the problem in this enigmatic and “cosmic” movie. Normally we don’t go to the theater to test our patience; we go mostly to have a good time. It can be a thriller, a comedy, a tragedy, a whatever, as long as it engages and surprises us, makes us laugh or maybe even cry.

But “The Tree of Life” that won the Palme d’Or Prize this year, the top honor at the Cannes Film Festival, doesn’t quite fit any category. It is too arty for its own good and the viewer is left wondering if director Terrence Malick isn’t trying too hard to impress with big ideas.

The story itself is actually quite moving. It follows the ups and downs – mostly downs - of the O’Brien family in the small town of Waco, Texas, in the 1950s. The father (Brad Pitt) is a stern and humorless patriarch who looks down on his three sons because he feels they do not measure up to him. They are not macho enough, intelligent enough and gifted enough. He is, of course, tragically oblivious of his own fundamental failings. The mother (Jessica Chastain) clings to the idea that love alone can conquer all and tries to bring a sense of normalcy to her children’s upbringing with grace and sweetness. When the middle child dies, she looses her poise. “Lord, why? Where were you? Who are we to you? Answer me?” her character asks in whispered voice-overs.

While life at home for the three kids is a fearful drill of taking orders from the father (“Don’t call me dad, call me father”), outside is an idyllic world of grass and sky and stream and meadows and friends. These impressionistic snippets are redolent of universal childhood and Malick captures them with sensitivity. What makes them also poignant is the tension at home.

At the ritualistic family dinner, one of the children cannot take the father’s overbearing behavior anymore and asks him to “keep quiet.” “What did you say?” screams the father. He grabs the child and locks him in a room. “You have turned my children against me,” he shouts at his wife. “You undermine everything I try to do.” The hunter is defending himself by claiming to be the hunted!

The wife has had enough. She retaliates by pushing him away. He immobilizes her with a viselike grip and releases her only when convinced that the last ounce of her resistance has sipped away.

But the father is not a one-dimensional character. He has the capacity for tenderness, even if not realized. As he prepares to play the piano one day, his middle son begins to strum on a guitar in the porch. The father hesitates, shocked by the musical gift of his son, and refrains from playing until the son has finished strumming. What makes the scene heartbreaking is the father’s inability to express his love and admiration. He simply cannot bring himself to say, “Son, that was lovely. Play for me more.”

All this would have made a touching, growing-up story of childhood, sadness, tragedy and ultimate redemption but Malick sandwiches it between heavy symbolism and metaphors that seem to take up the bulk of the movie’s 2 ¼ hours. We are treated to an interminable stretch of the creation of the universe, volcanoes, waves, dinosaurs, planets, asteroids and everything in between, just in case you miss the point that the director deals with heavy-duty ideas of chance, life, morality and mortality. The cinematography is gorgeous (I kept thinking it was the movie version of the great photographer Ernst Haas’s book, The Creation), but what’s the point? Just get on with the story, I wanted to tell Malick, and let us decide what to make of the impenetrable, big questions of life.

I will still recommend this movie because it shows what a father ought not to do to be a good father. Although “The Tree of Life” is a period piece from mid-20^th century, it is shocking how many fathers in our days are still stuck in that mindset. Fatherhood is fraught with tension, indifference, arrogance and often, downright cruelty. With Father’s Day coming up this Sunday, “The Tree of Life” is a movie a father should give as a gift to himself, to become the antithesis of the character portrayed by Brad Pitt.

*

“Midnight in Paris” is a delightful ode to the Jazz Age Paris of the 1920s when heavyweights of literature, painting, movies and music took up residence in the City of Light. It is Woody Allen’s most imaginative work to-date and connects the past to the present to put our preoccupation with money and fame in context. Unlike Allen’s recent movies, heavy with ambiguity and symbolism and the dark currents flowing in the human heart, “Midnight” is a beguiling movie to savor for its romance, charm and humor.

Gil is a disillusioned Hollywood screenwriter (Owen Wilson) who travels from Southern California to Paris with his fiancée Inez (Rachel McAdams) with the idea of settling down there. He is fed up with Hollywood. He has no desire writing scripts on-demand by tyrannical conglomerates. He wants to put the finishing touches to a novel that he dreams will set the literary world on fire when published. He wants this to happen in the artistic center of the Universe - Paris.

His fiancée, of course, has other ideas. Inez is as materialistic as they come, an epitome of conspicuous consumption. Ditto her parents who are also visiting Paris. The clash of the couple’s opposing life-view must be resolved, but how?

Walking back to his hotel alone one night, Gil loses his way in the alleys of Paris. At the stroke of midnight, a magical kind of taxi pulls up as he sits exhausted by the pavement. Its passengers invite him to join them. He is hesitant but buoyed by their enthusiasm, gets in. He is brought to a soiree where he runs into … Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Cole Porter and Ernest Hemingway. He has traveled across time and arrived at the Paris of 1920s!

The seamless way in which Allen does this is itself magical. As the midnight encounters continue on subsequent nights, Gil meets Picasso, Gertrude Stein (who promises to review his manuscript), Matisse, Salvador Dali, T.S. Eliot, Luis Bunuel, Man Ray and many others. Allen leavens the story with parodies of these famous characters. His parody of Hemingway, clipped sentences and all (“No subject is terrible if the story is true and if the prose is clean and honest”), is particularly hilarious.

Stein approves of Gil’s novel and that decides the issue for him. He will settle in Paris to pursue his literary muse. Inez throws a fit but only for a few minutes. She adjusts, the quintessential material girl, and banishes Gil from her life.

The movie ends on a happy note, though, and you find making a mental note to yourself: “I am going to have to see this movie one more time.”

Apple's Ascendance

For Steve Jobs, each Apple product - iPod, iPhone, iPad, iAnyThing - must not only be a marvel of technology but also a work of art. This confluence of function, design, aesthetics, software and hardware has captivated consumers around the globe and transformed Apple into the most valuable technology company in the world.

At the recent Worldwide Developer Conference in San Francisco, the visionary chiel of Apple unveiled another service – iCloud - that is likely to increase the company's lead over competition.

After some failed attempts, Apple has perfected the technology to eliminate the need for manually synchronizing content to smart devices. iCloud will allow users to store content - music, photos, backups, contacts, calendars, email and ebooks - on Apple’s remote servers (“cloud”) and have it automatically pushed to their iPhone, iPad, iPod and Mac or PC via WiFi.

iCloud is free. Each user gets 5GB of free storage, more than plenty for most consumers. More storage will require an annual subscription.

The term “automatically” is a critical differentiator. Apple users will not need to manually upload content to iCloud; it will happen, well, automatically. This is where Apple leapfrogs over its competitors. Both Amazon and Google have announced their own cloud services but they require manual uploading, a boring and time-consuming process that looks primitive compared to Apple’s.

The only “restriction” for iCloud to work seamlessly is that the devices will have to belong to the Apple ecosystem, that is, all the ‘i’ devices across the Apple universe. The company has ensured it by integrating iCloud technology into its operating systems – the iOS for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad, and the Mac OS for its laptop and desktop computers. All Apple devices will be able to “talk” to the cloud. Users will be able to move content to and from the cloud no matter where they are, as if they are communicating with their local hard drives. iCloud will also automatically backup all your mobile devices.

Will this lock current and future users into Apple products? Steve Jobs certainly hopes so. iCloud will become available in September with the release of iOS 5.

What does iCloud do to the current state of consumer technology? It profoundly disrupts it. As Jobs said: “We’re going to demote PC and Mac to just be a device. We’re going to move the digital hub, the center of your digital life, into the cloud.” The Post-PC world is upon us.

One company that Apple has completely overshadowed is Microsoft. Every time Apple releases a product or a service, Microsoft comes across as a plodding behemoth and a weak imitator. When Apple launched its wildly successful iPod in 2001, Microsoft followed with Zune in 2006 but withdrew it from the market in 2010. It was a no-contest: Zune was inferior to iPod in every way. When Apple introduced the iPhone in 2007, it took Microsoft 3 years before releasing a competitive product, Windows Phone 7. But the Microsoft phone is a distant third after the iPhone and Google’s Android phones. Microsoft’s purchase of Skype in May for $8.5 billion has left many industry analysts scratching their heads.

In May of 2010, Apple surpassed Microsoft as the world’s biggest technology company based on market value, after Apple almost went out of business in 1990. Apple now has a market value of about $320 billion, more than the combined value of Microsoft ($200 billion) and Intel ($115 billion)! The only other company in the world that has a greater market value is ExxonMobil ($390 billion), the oil company. Industry experts are speculating that Apple may overtake ExxonMobil in the near future.

While for the last 10 years, Microsoft stock has been stuck at about $25 a share, Apple’s stock soared from $11 a share in 2001 to its current value of $330, a rise of over 3000%!

The bulk of Microsoft’s revenue continues to be generated by its two cash cows, the Windows operating system and the Office suite. But as the digital hub moves from the PC to the cloud, and as the iPad relentlessly cuts into the sale of Windows PCs, the top technology company of the ‘80s and the ‘90s appears to be six or seven steps behind Apple.

There is no one with the vision and business acumen of Steve Jobs at Microsoft. Bill Gates, his closest competitor, left Microsoft in 2008, and while the current CEO Steve Ballmer is a talented manager, he is no Bill Gates and certainly no Steve Jobs. Recently, when a respected money manager asked Steve Ballmer to step down and pass on the torch to someone else, Microsoft stock immediately went up. Microsoft sorely needs a new vision and a new style of thinking at the top to regain the glory of its yesteryears.

Apple is on a roll. How long can this last? Just as empires rise and fall, so do technology companies. Today’s colossus is tomorrow’s also-ran. Yet Jobs seems to have found a way to keep reinventing Apple. He is currently battling pancreatic cancer but the vision he has laid out for his company and the creativity he has unleashed among his engineers will probably help Apple continue its dominance in mindshare and market share for several years to come.

As our gadgets become smarter and smarter, do we run the risk of becoming dumber and dumber? After all, if our smart devices can do our work for us and even think for us, what is left for us to do other than to scroll screens and push buttons for titillation and entertainment? Sure, we can create documents and post opinions and search databases and look up references and be connected to each other and to the cloud 24x7, but will our creativity be sucked out of us in that mode of mostly passive consumption? Smart devices may give us instant access to the world’s storehouse of knowledge but unless we set aside time for reflection and assimilation, it is difficult to see how intelligent gadgets can help produce a Fermi or a Tagore.

Justice in an Imperfect World

In a perfect world, justice delayed is indeed justice denied, but we live in an imperfect world and, therefore, justice delayed sometimes has to be considered as justice served.

Such is the case with Serbian commander Ratko Mladic, architect of the slaughter of 8,000 children, women and men in the Bosnian town of Srebrenica in 1995. Sixteen years after committing genocide and crimes against humanity, Mladic was arrested in Serbia on May 26 and now awaits extradition to the International Criminal Tribunal at The Hague in the Netherlands.

Srebrenica has become synonymous with mass murder and ethnic cleansing, comparable in intensity to Nazi atrocities against the Jews during World War II. Together with Radovan Karadzic, currently awaiting his own trial for crimes against humanity, Mladic demanded that his troops use rape as a weapon of war. The siege of Sarajevo that the two orchestrated lasted from 1992-1995 and took the lives of an estimated 10,000 Roman Catholic Croats and Bosnian Muslims. The cruelty was unrelenting, the savagery unmatched.

Mladic was driven by a sense of himself as a savior of his people and as the avenger of historical events that took place almost two centuries ago when Ottoman Turks ruled what is now Serbia. The death of his 23-year-old daughter by suicide in 1994 only increased his thirst for revenge.

Mladic’s arrest, and that of Karadzic in July 2008, sends a strong signal to the world’s despots that their days are numbered, that the long arm of international law will eventually flush them out from any dirty corner of the world they may be hiding in, and bring them to justice.

This is particularly important for Arab tyrants who, for decades, have been torturing and imprisoning their people at will while looting the national treasury for supporting their sybaritic lifestyles.

The Tunisian dictator Ben Ali fled the country when his people rose in revolt against him in January this year. Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and his sons were arrested in April for corruption, crimes and using deadly violence against protesters.

As long as the rule of law, and not vengeance, dictates the fate of these modern-day pharaohs, there is reason for optimism, although much remains to be done in a region where hereditary monarchy and oligarchy seems to have become the norm.

Libya’s Moammar Gadhafi has been killing Libyans with impunity since he seized power in 1969. He has never tolerated the slightest dissent and deployed spies and secret police to subjugate his people. Since the uprising against him in February, he has killed thousands of Libyans with the help of mercenaries. He has gone into hiding as NATO targets him and his sycophants in and around Tripoli. International Criminal Court prosecutor Luis-Moreno Ocampo is seeking arrest warrants against Gadhafi, his son Saif al-Islam and spy chief Abdullah al-Sensussi for crimes against humanity.

In Yemen, President Ali Abdullah Saleh refuses to bow to people’s will, adamantly clinging to power that he has held for 32 years. Hundreds of Yemenis have been killed and undoubtedly more will die in the coming days.

The situation is grimmest in Syria where Bashar Assad has let loose shadowy, mafia-style gunmen to kill protesters. The gunmen openly shoot people they think are a danger to Assad’s regime. They confiscate and grab whatever they like, be it cars, houses, or even women. So far, Assad’s loyalists and security forces have killed over 1,000 Syrians.

The similarity between Assad and Mladic is frightening. When the Syrian uprising began in March in the southern city of Dar’a, Assad ordered his troops to lay siege to the city, as Mladic did in Sarajevo, shutting off electricity, water and telephones. The army arrested schoolchildren who scrawled ant-government graffiti on walls and imprisoned hundreds of young men simply because of their age. There's also precedent in the family. Hafez Assad, Bashar Assad's father, laid siege to the city of Hama in 1982 and killed some twenty thousand Syrians as the world stood silently by.

Luis-Moreno Ocampo must urgently seek arrest warrants also against Bashar Assad and his brother Maher Assad, head of the elite Republican Guard. His troops continue to fire indiscriminately on peaceful protesters and funeral marchers in Syrian cities.

What these despots never anticipated was the reach of social media. Confronted with Twitter, Facebook and the likes, they appear frustrated even as the killing goes on. When government-appointed goons fire on protesters, the image is instantly broadcast across the globe. When a prisoner is tortured, the act is caught on camera and becomes instant news.

A young, web-savvy generation has found in technology an enabler that aids their revolution. They have lost their fear. There is no stopping them now as they fight and die for freedom and justice.

Generals and dictators who commit genocide against their perceived enemies or their own people cannot escape justice. It may take decades or it may take months, but they will have to account for what they have done and pay the price in courts of law. That is the new reality.