If you are looking for a breather from the daily grinds of life and want to lose yourself in a light fare of romance and laughter, steer clear of this movie. But if you want to witness an unflinching look at life in all its pathos and ambiguities, in which faith, loyalty, family values, traditional culture and class distinctions clash in a draining suspense worthy of both Hitchcock and John le Carre, then go see the Iranian masterpiece called “A Separation.”
Director Asghar Farhadi’s movie should win the Best Foreign Language Oscar this year. If not, we can conclude that something is seriously wrong with the Academy. The film has gained worldwide acclaim since its release in 2011 and has been racking up awards at film festivals, most recently the Golden Globe.
But award or no award, this is a superbly-crafted film that deals intelligently and unsparingly with the big questions of life. It pulls no punches. We are gripped by the emotional conflicts of the actors because we realize with a shock that these are our conflicts as well, in one form or another.
Nader (Peyman Maadi) is resisting divorce from his wife Simin (Leila Hatami) because she wants to migrate to a foreign land and he does not. He cannot bear the thought of abandoning his Alzheimer-stricken father (Ali-Asghar Shahbazi). The custody of the couple’s 11-year old daughter Termeh (Sarina Farhadi, the director’s daughter) is the bone of contention. It is unresolved at this point but Termeh decides to stay with her father when her mother moves in with her parents.
Nader has to find a caretaker for his headstrong but helpless father in a hurry. At his wife’s urging, he hires Razieh (Sareh Bayat), a chador-clad religious working-class woman. Razieh has problems of her own. She has to care for a young daughter. She has a psychopathic husband, Hodjat (Shahab Hosseini, to deal with. She has to travel a considerable distance by bus to reach Nader’s apartment, a perilous daily undertaking considering that she is pregnant (not known to the protagonists at the outset). She has to lie to her husband about the job because he would not approve of her caring for another man, even if he is over 80. But most of all, looking after an incontinent man turns out to be a nightmare, especially since Nader’s father has a habit of wandering off from the apartment when she is mopping floors or preparing food.
In this combustible mix, things can explode for any number of social, cultural or religious reasons, and they all do. Nader comes home one day in the very first week to find his father unconscious, his hands tied to the bed. Razieh is nowhere to be found. When she does show up, bedlam ensues. A crime of some kind is committed, although we are not sure who actually committed it. Nader finds himself in a court battle with Razieh and her husband, and soon his wife, daughter and neighbors are dragged into it as well. The autocratic and impassive judge infuriates both parties as he oscillates between indifference and high-handedness.
The key event on which the entire movie pivots is never shown, even in flashback. This is Asghar Farhadi’s masterstroke. By visually withholding what really happened (it is only revealed in a few words near the climax), he heightens the tension and achieves a shattering effect. I will not be giving away anything if I paraphrase what Nader says to Razieh as the two families are on the brink of working out a settlement: “Can you swear by the Quran that I am responsible for what happened to you?”
Razieh is unable to do so because, as a believer, she feels that if she lies and commits a sin, it will cast a shadow on her daughter.
A happy ending thus slips away. And when Termeh has to finally decide before a judge who she wants to live with – mom or dad – we see the parents waiting outside in the corridor, separated by a glass door, lost in their private agonies. The ending seems incomplete, similar to the ending in that famous 1882 short story by Frank Stockton called “The Lady, or the Tiger?” But in leaving us with a question, director Farhjadi has in reality made his movie complete, for in the moral universe that we inhabit, heartbreak occurs not from having to choose between right and wrong but between two equally compelling rights.
Sunday, January 29, 2012
Tuesday, January 17, 2012
Muhammad Ali Turns 70
Muhammad Ali turns 70 today. Happy Birthday, Greatest of All Time!
Time and Parkinson's may have slowed the champ down but his story continues to inspire millions around the world. Some of Ali's feats came from inside the ring but the reason why his story resonates is because of what he did outside. He spoke out against the Vietnam War and became a catalyst for young Americans to take a firm stand against that distant and futile adventure. He rejected the Jim Crow mentality of his country in the '60s with an audacity that was breathtaking and moving. He gave underdogs, particularly African-Americans, the courage to take charge of their destiny. He spoke truth to power long before politicians turned the phrase into a platitude. The boldness to go from Cassisus Clay to Muhammad Ali alone would have moved mountains.
Ali did all this and more but he faltered several times as well. He was sometimes cruel and mean toward his opponents (Floyd Patterson, Joe Frazier). He was callous toward his wife Belinda. He had extra-marital affairs.
Ali acknowledges his failings and that's what allows him to move forward. He was not one to hold grudge against anyone, including himself. He looked in the mirror and saw not only how pretty he was, as he was fond of reminding us, but also how flawed. He touched us with his humanity.
"These are the cards I was dealt, so don't be sad," he often tells his wife and children as they struggle to reconcile with his condition. He has found a serenity in his faith - Islam - that steadies him and fills him with gratitude for having come this far.
Ali never turned down a request for an autograph. He visited the sick whenever he could, persuaded a man about to commit suicide to choose life, and raised millions of dollars for charitable causes. His sense of humor and raw intelligence and, of course, his unparalleled ability to float like a butterfly and sting like a bee made him one of the most beloved icons of our time.
"I'd rather suffer now than in the hereafter," Ali says when people tell him how sorry they are about his Parkinson's. A champion all the way.
Time and Parkinson's may have slowed the champ down but his story continues to inspire millions around the world. Some of Ali's feats came from inside the ring but the reason why his story resonates is because of what he did outside. He spoke out against the Vietnam War and became a catalyst for young Americans to take a firm stand against that distant and futile adventure. He rejected the Jim Crow mentality of his country in the '60s with an audacity that was breathtaking and moving. He gave underdogs, particularly African-Americans, the courage to take charge of their destiny. He spoke truth to power long before politicians turned the phrase into a platitude. The boldness to go from Cassisus Clay to Muhammad Ali alone would have moved mountains.
Ali did all this and more but he faltered several times as well. He was sometimes cruel and mean toward his opponents (Floyd Patterson, Joe Frazier). He was callous toward his wife Belinda. He had extra-marital affairs.
Ali acknowledges his failings and that's what allows him to move forward. He was not one to hold grudge against anyone, including himself. He looked in the mirror and saw not only how pretty he was, as he was fond of reminding us, but also how flawed. He touched us with his humanity.
"These are the cards I was dealt, so don't be sad," he often tells his wife and children as they struggle to reconcile with his condition. He has found a serenity in his faith - Islam - that steadies him and fills him with gratitude for having come this far.
Ali never turned down a request for an autograph. He visited the sick whenever he could, persuaded a man about to commit suicide to choose life, and raised millions of dollars for charitable causes. His sense of humor and raw intelligence and, of course, his unparalleled ability to float like a butterfly and sting like a bee made him one of the most beloved icons of our time.
"I'd rather suffer now than in the hereafter," Ali says when people tell him how sorry they are about his Parkinson's. A champion all the way.
Sunday, January 08, 2012
The Last Book of Christopher Hitchens
The last published book of Christopher Hitchens, who died on 15 December, 2011 at age 62, is titled "Arguably." It is a collection of his previously-published essays, a fitting coda to a polemicist and a literary polymath. You don't have to agree with Hitchens, and there was much to disagree about - his support of the Iraq War, for instance - to recognize that his opinions were provocative, well-argued and always a great read. "Boring" is a word you will never associate with anything Hitchens wrote.
I read some of the essays in "Arguably" when they were first published in The Atlantic, Vanity Fair and the online magazine Slate. But what I found remarkable in the book is the content of the dedication page: "To the memory of Mohamed Bouazizi, Abu-Abdel Monaam Hamadeh, and Ali Mehdi Zeu."
Unless you were living in the woods as a hermit for the past two years, at least the first name - Mohamed Bouazizi - should ring a bell. He was the Tunisian vendor who set himself afire and launched the Arab Spring last year. But the others?
Well, here is Hitchens: "The three names on the dedication page belonged to a Tunisian street vendor, an Egyptian restaurateur, and a Libyan husband and father. In the Spring of 2011, the first of them set himself alight in the town of Sidi Bouzid, in protest at just one too many humiliations at the hands of petty officialdom. The second also took his own life as Egyptians began to rebel en masse at the stagnation and meaninglessness of Mubarak's Egypt. The third, it might be said, gave his life as well as took it: loading up his modest car with petrol and homemade explosives and blasting open the gate of the Katiba barracks in Benghazi - symbolic Bastille of the detested and demented Qadafi regime in Libya."
Why did Hitchens dedicate his last book to three Muslims who became known only after their death? Because, "in preferring a life-affirming death to a living death-in-life, the harbinger of the Arab Spring hoped to galvanize their fellow subjects and make them aspire to be citizens. Tides will ebb, waves will recede, the landscape will turn brown and dusty again, but nothing can expel from the Arab mind the example and esprit of Tahrir. Once again it is demonstrated that people do not love their chains or their jailers ..."
The faith of the three, Islam, was, of course, of no significance to Hitchens whatsoever. He railed against religion all his life and even wrote a best-seller reveling in his unfaith. What moved Hitchens was obviously the extraordinary courage of three nameless and faceless citizens who answered the calls of their conscience, a rarity at any time and in any age. For Hitchens, if anything could move mountains, this was it.
I always read Hitchens expecting to be provoked and entertained by his though as well as by his use of the language, and I was never disappointed. In fact, his polemical writings against religion, and, in particular, against Islam, only strengthened my faith because he forced me to dig deep and find answers to his charges and attacks with reason, study and yes, belief in the Unseen.
There is a silly tendency to anoint people with this or that title after they pass away. "He was the best essayist of his generation," was a refrain we heard after Hitchens' death. It really doesn't matter whether or not he was the best essayist, or whether that title belongs to Gore Vidal or to someone else. The point is that Hitchens brought a fresh point of view to everything he wrote, even when he was wrong, and in doing so, he always strove to fulfil the primary responsibility of a writer: provoke, excite, entertain, and expand the scope of readers while skewering the tyrants, the corrupt and the powerful, without pandering to anyone or to any ideology.
I read some of the essays in "Arguably" when they were first published in The Atlantic, Vanity Fair and the online magazine Slate. But what I found remarkable in the book is the content of the dedication page: "To the memory of Mohamed Bouazizi, Abu-Abdel Monaam Hamadeh, and Ali Mehdi Zeu."
Unless you were living in the woods as a hermit for the past two years, at least the first name - Mohamed Bouazizi - should ring a bell. He was the Tunisian vendor who set himself afire and launched the Arab Spring last year. But the others?
Well, here is Hitchens: "The three names on the dedication page belonged to a Tunisian street vendor, an Egyptian restaurateur, and a Libyan husband and father. In the Spring of 2011, the first of them set himself alight in the town of Sidi Bouzid, in protest at just one too many humiliations at the hands of petty officialdom. The second also took his own life as Egyptians began to rebel en masse at the stagnation and meaninglessness of Mubarak's Egypt. The third, it might be said, gave his life as well as took it: loading up his modest car with petrol and homemade explosives and blasting open the gate of the Katiba barracks in Benghazi - symbolic Bastille of the detested and demented Qadafi regime in Libya."
Why did Hitchens dedicate his last book to three Muslims who became known only after their death? Because, "in preferring a life-affirming death to a living death-in-life, the harbinger of the Arab Spring hoped to galvanize their fellow subjects and make them aspire to be citizens. Tides will ebb, waves will recede, the landscape will turn brown and dusty again, but nothing can expel from the Arab mind the example and esprit of Tahrir. Once again it is demonstrated that people do not love their chains or their jailers ..."
The faith of the three, Islam, was, of course, of no significance to Hitchens whatsoever. He railed against religion all his life and even wrote a best-seller reveling in his unfaith. What moved Hitchens was obviously the extraordinary courage of three nameless and faceless citizens who answered the calls of their conscience, a rarity at any time and in any age. For Hitchens, if anything could move mountains, this was it.
I always read Hitchens expecting to be provoked and entertained by his though as well as by his use of the language, and I was never disappointed. In fact, his polemical writings against religion, and, in particular, against Islam, only strengthened my faith because he forced me to dig deep and find answers to his charges and attacks with reason, study and yes, belief in the Unseen.
There is a silly tendency to anoint people with this or that title after they pass away. "He was the best essayist of his generation," was a refrain we heard after Hitchens' death. It really doesn't matter whether or not he was the best essayist, or whether that title belongs to Gore Vidal or to someone else. The point is that Hitchens brought a fresh point of view to everything he wrote, even when he was wrong, and in doing so, he always strove to fulfil the primary responsibility of a writer: provoke, excite, entertain, and expand the scope of readers while skewering the tyrants, the corrupt and the powerful, without pandering to anyone or to any ideology.
Sunday, January 01, 2012
Steve Jobs, Technology and Education
The late Steve Jobs of Apple was not smart in the conventional sense. Instead, as his biographer Walter Isaacson tells us in the bestseller “Steve Jobs,” he was a genius. “His imaginative leaps were instinctive, unexpected, and at times magical.”
One of the toughest problems America faces today is in education. Assessing the impact of technology in raising the quality of K-14 education has become a particularly thorny issue, considering that the future of the nation, and billions of dollars, are at stake
It is instructive to consider Jobs’ view on this. Unique among his peers, he positioned himself at the intersection of science and humanities and showed time and again that his gut feeling – intuition – was right in the products he envisioned and helped create.
Jobs didn’t think of technology as the silver bullet of education. As Isaacson points out, he was “somewhat dismissive of the idea that technology could transform education.” The ability to focus, think through problems and solve them requires patience, perseverance and hard work, qualities that technology is unlikely to foster.
Microsoft’s Bill Gates, on the other hand, and with whom Jobs had a contentious professional relationship, has more faith in the power of technology to transform education. His foundation has spent billions of dollars equipping classrooms across the country with state-of-the-art technology. As Gates sees it, it is a crucial innovation to use interactive technology to deliver high-quality materials for teachers and students. He feels that software can be used to tailor lessons for individual students so that they do not waste time on the things they already know and focus on areas they do not. “That's the kind of innovation that can lead to a brighter future for everyone,” says Gates.
Well, we have had over a decade of technology in classrooms – laptops, big interactive screens, software – in school districts from California and Arizona to New York and Maine. Analysis of the vast amount of data collected shows that, so far at least, Jobs’ view is holding out. Despite the extensive presence of technology in the school curricula, test scores remain stubbornly stagnant in reading, math and science.
In contrast, consider the successful Waldorf School in Los Altos, California, in the heart of Silicon Valley. The school, attended by children of local high-tech executives, operates on the principle that computers and schools don’t mix. Computers, according to the school, constrain creative thinking, reduce human interaction and play havoc with attention spans. Students and their parents couldn’t be more in sync with the Waldorf objectives.
This, of course, does not mean that technology will disappear from the nation’s classrooms. If anything, there will be even more technology in the future. The Waldorf is probably an exception. What it does mean, however, is that we haven’t yet found the best way to use technology to take education to a higher level.
There was one area in education where Jobs had strong feelings. He wanted to blow away the harmful and monopolistic textbook business through digital learning materials. As Isaacson writes, the “textbook industry was $8 billion a year, ripe for digital destruction. That was the next business he wanted to transform. His method was iPad. He wanted to hire great textbook writers to create digital versions, and make them a feature of the iPad.” Jobs’ clearly saw that “the
process by which states certify textbooks is corrupt. But if we can make textbooks free, and they come with this iPad, then they don’t have to be certified.” What was left unsaid was that the relief it would provide to students – mental, financial, physical – would be incalculable.
A cynic might suggest that Jobs’ real goal was to make the iPad ubiquitous in the nation’s classrooms, like other Apple products. But they would be missing the point. Jobs understood that creating new textbooks by world-class authors offered the best chance to free the nation’s students from the unethical and destructive practices of textbook publishers. In spite of earnest recommendations by well-meaning educators, the textbook industry continues to become even more powerful and monopolistic. The digital versions of their bloated and confusing textbooks are offered mostly as options, adding to the already sky-high cost of education. Jobs had the right vision. Recall how he converted music exceutives to his point of view and what he did for music with the iPod. So, for textbooks, if the iPad was his preferred medium of delivery, in all fairness, could anyone object to that?
One wonders if Apple has leaders as bold, brash and intuitive as Jobs was, leaders who can “think different” and launch projects to turn America’s moribund school system around. If not, high-tech companies specializing in so-called “educational technology” will clean up on the billions of educational dollars available through federal grants and private foundations without making any difference whatsoever, even as thousands of teachers are laid off and school budgets shrink to disastrous levels
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)