Amardeep wrote a short review of Acting Like a Thief: I downloaded and watched the clip, and would definitely recommend it: another glimpse on how how the other half (or, to be more precise, the other three-quarters!) lives in India. At a simple level, it’s interesting just to hear these people talk. At times they [...]
The BBC reports on a new study which claims that wars are less frequent and less deadly now than they were before. Surprisingly, one of the factors here is the remarkably high rate of success with UN peacekeeping missions. As MoJo blog points out: They cite “a RAND study that shows that two-thirds of UN [...]
People are being really great about leaving their Acting Like a Thief BitTorrent files open after they finish downloading. That means right now there are 8 seeds for the movie! Thank you so much everyone! {acting like a thief, bittorrent, dnt, hooch and hamlet}
賊模賊樣—以劇場對抗 That’s how Zonble translated Acting Like a Thief into Chinese on his blog. This is great – now we need more translations! Visit Acting Like a Thief web site and try it out for yourself. We can post the translation on the site ourselves, or link to a blog entry you wrote. {acting like [...]
Announcing Acting Like a Thief! Now available as a free BitTorrent download or, for a $50 donation, as a DVD. Acting Like a Thief is a short film about the Budhan Theatre of Chharanagar. Starting with playwright Dakxin Bajrange discussing his arrest , the film brings us inside the lives of a dedicated group of [...]
While most educated people who read the papers regularly have a vague understanding that there were communal riots in India in the recent past, almost no non-desi American I’ve met has any idea of the political situation which led to these riots. I think there is a tendency to see religious violence as somehow “natural,” [...]
I know everyone’s budget is drained, but please give something to help Pakistan. This post at Cliopatria recommends some charities you might not have heard of. Loads of good links and round-ups in the following posts: Global Voices Pinko Feminist Hell Cat Lorenz Amardeep Kathryn Cramer {Earthquake, Pakistan}
I love Indian bureaucratese! My new favorite term is “the creamy layer” which I came across while doing research for the film. On this “central list of backward classes” is a list of “Persons/Sections Excluded from Reservation which constitute Creamy Layer of the Society.” I think that we should start using this term in the [...]
A lot of the discussion around Hacker and Pierson’s new book focuses on how the Democratic party can wrest control away from the Republicans. What Hacker and Pierson have done is show just how difficult this is to do. A political system has emerged which increasingly favors incumbents, and in pay-to-play money politics makes it [...]
I’m a huge fan of director Fernando Meirelles after seeing City of God, and I wasn’t disappointed with his breakthrough Hollywood movie, The Constant Gardener. Interestingly enough, the Hollywood film was more languidly paced than the intense Brazilian blockbuster. I loved how he cut between the intense chaos of public scenes (whether in the Third [...]