© Methuen

'Not racist'

With less than 72 hours to go before the worldwide release of Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin comes news that a Belgian prosecutor has recommended to the country's courts to reject an application to have Tintin in the Congo banned for racism.

According to a Reuters report, Belgian prosecutor Valery de Theux de Meylandt, whose opinion is requested and typically followed by the court, advised judges in a written statement to rule against campaigner Bienvenu Mbutu Mondondo's application to have Tintin in the Congo banned for racism.

Meylandt said in the document that Tintin author Georges Remi (better known as Herge) did not intend to incite racial hatred when he depicted his cartoon hero on an adventure in the former Belgian colony in a 1931 work that was updated in 1946.

"The representations (of African people) by Herge are a reflection of his time," Meylandt wrote.

Intention is a key criteria in substantiating a charge of racism, the Reuters report said, adding, the court was expected to deliver a judgment early next year rejecting or accepting Mondondo's argument that the book's depiction of Africans was racist.

Tintin in the Congo was one of a series of comic books about the adventures of a boy journalist and his dog Snowy, which were first published in 1931. Mondondo has taken aim at the modern version of the updated 1946 book.

The application deserves to be crumpled into a ball and tossed into the trash can. Now let's sit back and enjoy the film.

I've got mom, you see!

Deewaar (The Wall in Hindi) is the mother of all movies and has the mother of all dialogues. The Bollywood blockbuster, produced by Gulshan Rai and directed by Yash Chopra in 1975, is the tragic story of two brothers, Vijay (Amitabh Bachchan) and Ravi (Shashi Kapoor), whose ideals take them in diametrically opposite directions.

The eldest, Vijay, grows up to become a boot polisher-turned-dock worker-turned underworld kingpin while his younger brother, Ravi, becomes an honest and upright police officer who eventually kills his sibling and proves that the law is equal for everyone, bhayya (brother) or badmaash (scoundrel).

Torn between the two warring brothers is the helpless and weeping mother, Sumitra Devi (Nirupa Roy, the eternal celluloid mom), whose heart and conscience are in conflict throughout the 175-minute long movie. While she loves both her sons equally, she is forced to choose in the end, and predictably, she chooses Ravi over Vijay, virtue over vice.

Deewaar is the mother of all movies (though some might argue it's Mother India, 1957) because Sumitra Devi is a single mother who suffers immense hardship and humiliation as she raises her sons through a strict moral code. It works and doesn't work. While Bollywood films are replete with single-mother themes, nowhere is her role more intense and captivating than in Deewaar (though others might argue it's still Mother India), which celebrates Indian womanhood and motherhood on a grand scale.

Deewaar also has the mother of all dialogues because of the following conversation between the two brothers, a line that has become the tagline of the film.

Bachchan (right) and Kapoor face off in Deewaar

Vijay (Amitabh Bachchan) paraphrasing: Your principles? Where have your principles got you? What have they given you? a two-bit police job? A change of uniform? A rundown police jeep? Now look at me: I have a bungalow, a car, money. What do you have?

Ravi (Shashi Kapoor) feelingly: I have mother!

What Ravi actually says, in Hindi, is: "Mere paas maa hai!" Translated literally, it means "I have got mom!" He utters just those four magical words and in one fell swoop demolishes his crooked brother's misplaced pride and his earthly possessions. Poor Vijay knows he has lost everything. But did he own anything?

HOT OFF THE PRESS

P.D. James adds dark twist to Pride and Prejudice

Best-selling British novelist P.D. James has written a new book that picks up where Pride and Prejudice left off and introduces a decidedly sinister twist to the Jane Austen classic: a deadly crime. Death Comes to Pemberley will be published by Knopf on December 6, the publishing company announced in a news release.

© Knopfdoubleday

Set in 1803 at Pemberley, the Darcy family estate, five years after Austen concluded her original story, James’ new novel finds Elizabeth and Darcy happily married, with two fine sons, and enjoying regular visits from Elizabeth’s sister Jane and her husband Bingley. There is talk about the prospect of marriage for Darcy’s sister Georgiana, lingering resentment over the elopement of Elizabeth’s sister Lydia with the dishonourable Wickham, and rumours that war will soon break out between England and France.

Still, life continues at Pemberley, and preparations are being made for the annual ball. But on the evening before it is to take place, the idyll is suddenly shattered. There are gunshots and screams, a body is discovered in the woods, and all at once the story evolves into a murder mystery—one recognisable as P.D. James at her best, yet conveyed with all the charm and wit of Jane Austen.

"I have to apologise to Jane Austen," says James, "for involving her beloved Elizabeth in a murder investigation. It has been a joy to revisit Pride and Prejudice and to discover, as one always does, new delight and fresh insights. This fusion of my two enthusiasms—for the novels of Jane Austen and for writing detective novels–has given me great pleasure."

P.D. James is the author of 20 previous books, most of which have been filmed and broadcast on television in the US and other countries. She spent 30 years in various departments of the British Civil Service, including the Police and Criminal Law Departments of Great Britain’s Home Office, and in 1991, she was named Baroness James of Holland Park.

Knopf has set a first printing of 300,000 copies for Death Comes to Pemberley. It will also be published as an e-book and available in audio from Random House.

Source: www.doubleday.knopfdoubleday.com

Philanthropy in early English literature

Philanthropy is a recurring theme in English literature of the Victorian era that spanned a large part of the 19th century and an early bit of 20th century, a period that also saw the novel establish itself with a new force.

For example, Thomas Hardy shows his charitable side in Jude the Obscure when the stonemason, Jude Fawley, struggling to overcome the difficulties in his adolescent years, dreams of making it big when he grows up. He dreams of becoming even a bishop by leading a pure life. “…and what an example he would set! If his income were £5,000 a year, he would give away £4,500 in one form and another, and live sumptuously (for him) on the remainder,” Hardy conveys through his young working-class hero.

When every aspect of early literature has been dissected and analysed by literary historians, can the noble deed of charity be left out? In his first book titled Philanthropy in British and American Fiction: Dickens, Hawthorne, Eliot and Howells, Frank Christianson, an Assistant Professor at Brigham Young University, a private university in Utah, USA, examines how each of the acclaimed writers used “the figure of philanthropy both to redefine the sentiments that informed social identity and to refashion their own aesthetic practices.”

How was philanthropy practiced and represented in a period marked by self-interest and rational calculation? Christianson asks and answers in his book, which I must admit I haven’t read yet.

Charles Dickens combined his writing skill with his charitable disposition. For one who pronounced, “Have a heart that never hardens, and a temper that never tires, and a touch that never hurts,” Dickens certainly knew his way around philanthropy. Among his many acts of charity, Dickens helped a hospital overcome its financial crisis, went to the aid of abused children, and founded a home for “fallen” women – some of the people he encountered along the way became part of his novels and stories.

Going back to Hardy, stonemason Jude Fawley yearns to get out of the southern region of Wessex and migrate to Christminster where he dreams of becoming a scholar. As a young boy in Wessex, Fawley becomes the willing recipient of his school teacher’s kindness before Mr. Phillotson leaves for Christminster to pursue a higher academic career – a move that fuels Fawley’s own dream.

In her first book The Mysterious Affair at Styles, Agatha Christie brings Hercule Poirot from Belgium to Britain as a refugee during WWI and finds refuge for him and some fellow Belgians at Styles, through the generous patronage of Emily Inglethorp, the wealthy mistress of Styles Court. In one of life’s ironies, Poirot repays Emily’s kindness by bringing her murderer to justice.

While these are but a few instances of philanthropy in classic English literature, British and American fiction is replete with acts of charity and kindness that people can imbibe while they read the books.

With magic potion...

© Asterix & Obelix, Hodder Dargaud, UK

...and without!

© Jataka Tales, Amar Chitra Katha, India

Stamp of an Actor: Groucho Marx

“I never forget a face, but in your case I'll be glad to make an exception.”

“One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don't know.”

“From the moment I picked up your book until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.”

“Go, and never darken my towels again.”

“Age is not a particularly interesting subject. Anyone can get old. All you have to do is live long...”

“I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book.”

“Well, my mother and father talked it over and they finally moved to New York, a little house in the Bronx. And it was in that little house that Abraham Lincoln was born, much to my father's surprise. And that, boys and girls, was the beginning of the Lincoln Highway.”

“Do you mind if I don't smoke?”

“Practically everybody in New York has half a mind to write a book — and does.”

“Now there sits a man with an open mind. You can feel the draft from here.”

“Oh, I know it's a penny here and a penny there, but look at me. I worked myself up from nothing to a state of extreme poverty.”

“You're a brave man. Go and break through the lines. And remember, while you're out there risking your life and limb through shot and shell, we'll be in here thinking what a sucker you are.”

“Hello, I must be going.”

#2 Ode to a Dream

© Simon & Schuster

Take this kiss upon the brow!

And, in parting from you now,

Thus much let me avow —

You are not wrong, who deem

That my days have been a dream;

Yet if hope has flown away

In a night, or in a day,

In a vision, or in none,

Is it therefore the less gone?

All that we see or seem

Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar

Of a surf-tormented shore,

And I hold within my hand

Grains of the golden sand —

How few! yet how they creep

Through my fingers to the deep,

While I weep — while I weep!

O God! can I not grasp

Them with a tighter clasp?

O God! can I not save

One from the pitiless wave?

Is all that we see or seem

But a dream within a dream?

— A Dream Within A Dream by Edgar Allan Poe