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"Born into Brothels" Stars the Good Fairy, Really, Not the Kids

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

Expecting a gush of hard-core sentimentality, I stubbornly resisted this documentary for weeks. But it’s set in Calcutta, now Kolkata, where I lived and worked for two years, so I had to check it out....

I’m settling into my seat, shrugging off my jacket, when the woman in front of me twists around and calls to a friend a few rows back. “I’ve seen it twice,” she honks. “You'll love it! You’ll adore it!”

I cringe, feeling a little grinchy, recalling the blurb in the local grab-it-for-free alternative weekly. The film has been held over, again and again, so more good people can irrigate their tear ducts, evidently:

When even hardened film critics are weeping copiously during the press screening, you know you’ve got the real thing on your hands. Zana Briski’s Oscar-winning documentary parallels [?] her work teaching photography to eight talented boys and girls, the children of prostitutes from Calcutta’s notorious red-light district Sonagachhi. Over the brief but brutally affecting course of the film you become almost as desperate as Briski over their individual fates, as she struggles to find funding and a boarding school willing to accept the children of sex workers. Briski and her co-director Ross Kauffman are smart enough to stay mostly out of the way, letting the stunning, raw photographs of the children tell the story.

Notice those scene-setting descriptors: notorious, brutal, desperate, raw. Poor Calcutta/Kolkata, still seen through the lens of the horrendous “black
hole" which wasn’t a hole, only a chamber too small for all the English prisoners stuffed into it on a hellishly hot day before AC, which means a lot of them died of heat prostration. The local ruler, it seems, had briefly regained power, treating his English captives with the sort of disdain the English had shown toward Indians. Ever since, the West–Zana Briski included–has been taking revenge on Calcutta.

Sonagachhi itself, by the way, dates back to colonial days, when it served the “needs” of the lower ranks of the British military, those who couldn’t afford to set up “native” mistresses in private domestic establishments. Here is a passage from the prologue of a fascinating study entitled Dangeous Outcaste: The Prostitute in Nineteenth Century Calcutta by Sumanta Banerjee:

Like other pre-colonial socio-economic formations, the profession of prostitution also underwent a dramatic change in Bengal soon after the British take-over. It attracted a wide variety of women from different segments of the population from both within and outside Bengal, and acquired new types of clientele....It was also subjected to attempts at control and surveillance by the colonial administration, as well as reassessment by the newly [English] educated... descendents of the old Bengali households. From the relative obscurity of the periphery of rural society in pre-colonial Bengal, the prostitute suddenly emerged into the full glare of publicity in Calcutta, the capital of colonial Bengal....There was an explosion of morbid curiosity and prurient voyeurism around her lifestyle....

Bush’s Energy Policy

by CKR

I watched President Bush’s news conference last night having believed the pre-conference hype that it would be about energy. It wasn’t; it was about social security and taking the spotlight off Tom DeLay and supporting his guy John Bolton and distancing himself from the religious nuts in Congress.

Bush started out by feeling the pain of everyone who is paying more for gasoline. But, he said, little can be done in the near term to bring those prices down except to ask the oil producers to produce more. Presumably he did that the other day and got not much of an answer, because he didn’t share it with us.

He rattled off four points to legitimize the pre-conference hype:

First, we must better use technology to become better conservers of energy.

And secondly, we must find innovative and environmentally sensitive ways to make the most of our existing energy resources, including oil, natural gas, coal and safe, clean nuclear power.

Third, we must develop promising new sources of energy, such as hydrogen, ethanol or bio-diesel.

Fourth, we must help growing energy consumers overseas, like China and India, apply new technologies to use energy more efficiently and reduce global demand of fossil fuels.

He then urged Congress to pass his energy bill and hurried on to the real topics. There was only one question on energy.

President Bush's Penchant for First Names

By CKR

President Bush frequently refers to other heads of state by their first names. Tonight, as in the joint press conference with President Putin, he called that president Vladimir. Four times tonight, although twice he appended the last name.

As I recall, previous presidents have referred to their counterparts as "Mr. President/Prime Minister" or "President Last Name" or "Mr. Last Name." Something that indicates both distance and respect.

Mr. Bush (or should I say George?) is either too presumptuous or lets his personal relationships leak into his professional duties. When he used the first name and Mr. Putin was more formal, it sounded condescending. If I had heard "Volodya" in the joint press conference, I might have believed that it was a personal relationship.

It seemed to me tonight that Mr. Bush was also using reporters' first names in the way I've heard bosses do that in borderline putdowns. Robert Kaiser of the Washington Post agreed on that. It's one thing to recognize the reporters by their first names, but in almost every answer, Mr. Bush would append the name. The worst was something like, "That's the way the American system works, John." In case you didn't know, dummy.

UF6 Revisited

by CKR

I’m seeing a fair number of hits on WhirledView articles related to UF6. Some of them are from this site, but most of them are from searches.

So I thought I’d collect the links relevant to the discussion. I’m curious, though, as to why this subject is popular. Please enlighten me in the comments section.

First, a short recap. Two different stories ran on 2 February in the Washington Post and the New York Times, both suggesting that North Korea sent UF6 to Libya. The two stories seemed potentially incompatible to me, so I wrote a post. Jeffrey Lewis and Paul Kerr at Arms Control Wonk picked it up too, and we had a bit of a dialog. Here are the posts in chronological order:

2 February

2 February

3 February

9 February

And then North Korea said it wasn’t interested in talking with the warmonger US.

Fast forward six weeks, and we find that the stories about the North Korea-Libya connection weren’t true, the US knew they weren’t true, and presumably so did North Korea. I thought Jeffrey did a good enough job of covering it that I didn’t bother. Or maybe I was just too disgusted.

But now, as some of John Bolton’s spoiler antics are coming to light, I can’t help but wonder if he wasn’t a part of this too. He was in a position to have the information in those original WaPo and NYT articles.

Cell Phones and Brain Tumors

by CKR

One of our readers, a few weeks back, asked if I’d address the issue of cell phones and brain tumors. I didn’t at that time, but I need to turn away from politics this morning.

Here’s a short summary of the latest from a Danish team of researchers: no increased risk of brain tumors. Here’s some more on the subject, with links.

I agree with the studies that say there is no increased risk.

There’s a great deal of misinformation and fear attached to the word radiation. Cell phones send and receive via microwave radiation. (Maybe if we say the word enough, we'll get used to it.) There’s a whole spectrum of electromagnetic radiation out there, from radio waves to gamma rays, with light and microwave falling in between. (The NASA site I’ve linked talks down, but it’s good otherwise.)

One of the fears has been that microwaves will interact in unknown ways with brain tissue to damage DNA, leading to cancers. I spent a few years working on ways to influence chemical reactions with laser radiation, so I can speak to this point.

Silly Corporate Censors

By Patricia Lee Sharpe

A little while ago GM announced that the company wouldn’t be placing ads in the Los Angeles Times because a GM vehicle had received a less than stellar review. Obviously the editor was supposed to check out the potential damage to the bottom line, then cringingly promise never, never to dis a GM product again.

Part of me wants to be angry, to launch into a wild tirade about the bloated power of large corporations and the danger they pose to free speech, an independent press and all that.

The other part of me thinks the GM snit attack is supercolossally funny. No wander GM can’t sell its cars. It manufactures misfits, then punishes the criticism that might help it get back on track. Does this company deserve to die or what?

Weatherford's Genghis Khan - a Book Review Essay

By Patricia H. Kushlis

Jack Weatherford's Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World

"Genghis Khan was a doer." - Washington Post, 1989

I woke up to flashes of lightening, crashes of thunder and pellet-sized rain drops hammering away at the roof. I could say that this is what inspired me to shift gears and write the book review that I had been putting off for the past couple of weeks. Maybe so; maybe not. Regardless, the book in question is Jack Weatherford’s Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World (Random House, 2004) and it’s terrific.

I found Weatherford’s Genghis Khan not through the New York Times bestseller list – although apparently it appeared on it at one time – but on a table at Page One, an independent bookstore in Albuquerque, New Mexico on Easter Sunday. It took me a couple of weeks to open the book’s front cover, but once I did, I found it impossible to put down. This incredible story is masterfully told. Here, Weatherford presents in 271 paperback pages a sweep of medieval history expressed in human terms.

Genghis Khan’s (1162 CE-1227 CE) history as a warrior is all too well known in the West. In fact, that’s the sum total of what is remembered here. Genghis Khan and his descendants are normally painted in grisly terms. What Weatherford shows us, however, is that this Hollywood-set theme of horror on the warpath was often not so. And he explains that Genghis Khan and his descendants brought about Pax Mongolica, a century or more of peace among the fiercely battling tribes that inhabited the trade routes between Europe and eastern China known as the fabled Silk Road.

Tuesday Wildflower Blogging

By CKR

It's been raining the past several days, which is wonderful.

Much of my yard is natural, or nearly so. I planted native wildflower and grass seeds last year, but I suspect that the plants that are blooming now were here before.

Unfortunately, I can't tell you the official names of any of these (with one exception, which I'll save until last). I think that this first one is a vetch, because of the pea-like leaves and flowers. The whole mound is about 25 centimeters across.

I've consulted four wildflower guides and can't find any of them. I suspect that there are a couple of reasons for this.

The first is that wildflower guides seem to be of the author's favorite wildflowers or of BIG wildflowers. It doesn't seem to be that the flowers listed have to be those that people are likely to see; larger orchids, for example, which are hidden away in the higher mountains are included, and hardly anyone will ever see them.

That's some kind of composite. The flowers are about 3 centimeters across. Yellow daisies are difficult to identify, but the leaves should be diagnostic. The closest I can find in the guides is Panamint daisy, which obviously must live in California, probably not here.

This one is the lovliest. The stems are about 20 cm long, and the lavender flowers form a light mist, wavering together in the breeze. The flower heads are maybe a centimeter across. I think the long curved things are seed pods.

The second reason I may not be finding these plants in my guides is that I lack the patience to go through the identification schemes: Stamens 15 or more; Leaves without conspicuous sheathing stipules; Stems mostly vining or creeping. I can handle the last, and I know most of the technical words, but counting stamens in flowers a few millimeters across? And while I find diagrams or drawings most helpful in identifying birds, photographs work better for me with plants. Do you know how many flowers have approximately the shape of those little lavender guys? I suspect from that that they're in the pentstemon family.

That's mistletoe, the golden bough of antiquity. It's not blooming, but I saw it for the first time yesterday in one of my juniper trees. It's not so good for the tree, a parasite, but my experience is that it usually doesn't kill the whole tree, just a few branches. And this one is just a baby so far.

If anyone knows of a good wildflower book for the western United States, with lots of photos or really good drawings (like the Collins Guide to Wild Flowers of Britain and Northern Europe), let me know.