War for the Planet of Apes, is a moral visual enterprise with a voice which speaks for the times we live in. A
script which lauds the underdog, but complicates the idea of war more than a binary which plays to the gallery. A film which is rich in resistance imagery, has a Schindler-esque feel which concentration camps and a white majoratarian edge to it with heavy chanting to the supreme leader, who is obviously fashioned as a leader of a violent militia, with a value laden end, making the ideological frameworks of both parties, the subdued apes and humans look novel on their own independent trajectories. War is rather messed up. The movie questions the value of war, violence, redemption, resistance in a gripping script where top notch performances anchor the two hour plus long movie. The CG and the background scores are the heroes of a political story wrapped around as a superhero film, much deeper than what meets the eye. Glorious social justice watch, entertaining to the brim. Must watch. Many thanks to Jiya for suggesting this picture.
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Author: changethinker
The Price of a Dream
Dreams do have a price Aspirations, Energy, Motivations
Multiple synonyms
Value dense
Societies and relationships are transactions
What is the Gross Merchandise Value
For your teenage dream on Amazon
Yes, it has a meagre value
That, life becomes void
And survival is the name of the game
Images/Dreams
When dreams fadeResolves converge
Fire comes along
New images flicker
Life/Resonance, A Poem
Life is a tapestry of hues and colors
We exist at different frequencies
Just to navigate the spectrum
Life is not a theoretical ‘zero loss’ scenario
As masterfully theorised by Mr. Sibal
Also a poet, by the way
We resonate at one node
Cancel out the noise at the other
As Suzanna says, like India
People too exist in various centuries at the same time
Life is a delicious chaos
The messier, the more interesting it gets
Streamlining is deflecting the noise
Sometimes noise as life itself is unorthodox symphony
Creative Destruction, hardly creative: A Poem
Creative Destruction, so romantic
Discourse dominating
Almost a cottage industry in management literature
Reality is, less subtle
Destruction is painful
Livelihoods snatched away
Old way of live, evaporates
The residues, do not get media spotlight
Academic jargon sterilises pain
And destruction is celebrated
Creative Destruction is operative term for jobs lost
In software, due to automation
Evolution is social, with a cost
Lives on the line
Inconvenient truths, swished away under the carpet
And blame it on Schumpeter
Migrant turns Resident, A Poem
Times flies away
Such as shifting sands of time
We try to arrest the insatiable flow
Spaces linger, images turn memories
Memories reside as nostalgia
Come to life, as if summoned on call
The fate of the gulf migrant is such
the ‘Near-Abroad’, two hours from Mumbai
But, as far as eternity, once the passport controls are past
Hard to fit in to our passport homes
Where people see the migrants as portable ATM Machines
The government stops seeing us as remittance nodes
The NRI becomes, resident
Becomes pretty useless for the state, the relatives and the village
The once feted, becomes jobless and turns into a statistic
The Youth fades away as time
The migrant’s only home resides in photos on his Iphone
The image, becomes the emotional panacea
MP
09/07/2017
Muscat
Lepore disrupts disruption
I have read the entire long read where Jill Lepore disrupts/punctures the disruption bubble based on some very serious analysis, including the MIT article which she cites, and I have read that too. The punch line is to not buy in to the myth of theorising without going in to the background data sets. Again, the tech crowd does not like to deep dive in to such non commercial activities and is caught in subscribing to theological matters rather than thought processes to innovate. The etymology of radical is root, think fundamentals as the long read posits. Thanks to FB where this post was initially on; on Twitter it would not have been possible to explain, brevity is post truth. New Yorker normally attracts the best liberal arts minds globally. Jill Lepore, a Harvard Don herself prefers to write her arguments in her narratives, unfamiliar to the tech crowd accustomed to heuristics.
Recreate Reality, a Poem
It takes courage to confront reality
As it hurts to feel things slipping away
Though it is a window to create something fresh
Is it really novel that we want?
Or are we trying to create the same magic again?
Food conundrums for the Bangladeshi Worker in the ‘Arob Probash’
It was a gulf sultry summer evening as I sit in an Andhra restaurant that is staffed by an eclectic crew from Hyderabad, Madurai, Kolkata from India and Barisal in Bangladesh. I ask my friend who is a service staff to take me to an unofficial Bangladeshi ‘Mess’ or an eatery where reasonably priced set meals are available, as was discussed for a few interactions earlier. This particular neighborhood in the capital of a Gulf nation was initially all residential which has become more commercial as the years have passed by. My friend, who is educated, comes from a middle class family in Barisal and his other two brothers also live in the same town. He did not work in Bangladesh, and had his first job in the Gulf. He was not able to find something suitable back home and rather preferred to come overseas to find his destiny. As we walk through some dark labyrinthine alleyways behind the restaurant lane where he works to reach an area that is pictorially out of an urban area in South Asia, hidden from the rich Arab imaginaries of the Gulf. The area is flooded with folks chattering in Bangla, as my friend waves hands to people who recognize and shout ‘Salaam’ to him.
My friend is enthusiastically keen to show me the place. He points out shops where Bangladeshi snacks such as ‘Chola But’ are available for a rate, which is financially accessible to the migrant bachelor bodies of the Gulf. The area reminds me of similar Bangladeshi communities such as Rolla Bank Street in Sharjah or Kuala Lumpur Chinatown or Desker Road in Singapore. We then twist and turn through alleyways and turn left to a landed property, which has a terrible stench of sweat. This is strangely a minority Hindu Bangladeshi eatery as my friend presumed that I am Hindu and do not eat Beef, both two nearly incorrect assumptions. He did not take me to his usual Muslim Bangladeshi eatery, which is also not formal, in the eyes of the law as they mix beef in the goat mutton curry there, although the rates are even cheaper.
The informal eatery had a bunch of young men chatting way outside the main entrance, which is obviously non, descript. We enter the door navigating through a courtyard where a sweaty young man was peeling potatoes. We enter a room, which had a man sitting on the floor on a newspaper digging into fish curry and rice. The room had a Hindu prayer place/altar attached to the wall, with two men, one presumably in his thirties and one older, keen to chat up. The room has small and congested with a bunk bed and a table with two large containers with rice and fish curry.
They immediately detect that I do not come from Bangladesh from my accent, and rather from across the border. The younger ‘food entrepreneur’ made a slight pitch commenting that many successful white collar professionals especially with a precise emphasis on ‘engineers’ from my country come to him to buy food from his eatery. The hygiene levels were certainly not the best, which reflects in the reasonable price structure affordable for the migrant worker. Migrant Diasporas configure their own social infrastructure to recreate a semblance of home, in the near abroad as a coping mechanism.
My friend ordered a fish curry and a vegetable dish, skipping on the rice, which he gets, from the restaurant that he works. He avails three square meals a day there, all south Indian hence he comes to this informal eating place to pick up food native to his home country. He however was keen in nailing the economic cost of migration to come to the Gulf on the way back after picking up the meal.
‘The Bangladeshi, himself is to blame for his predicament’ my educated friend indicts the racket called ‘Adam Bepari’ or the agent.
The friend or relative extorts a huge sum to bring the worker from back home. This is a disease inflicting Bangladeshi Migrant Workers from Singapore to the Gulf. The migration cost for a work visa charged by the Bangladeshi ‘Adam Bepari’ is in the range of three lakh taka upwards, much lower than Singapore though where certification costs bump up the costs. The worker often takes three years to pay back the migration cost, often taken as a loan from a bank or having sold off the family silver. When the worker cannot pay back the sum, the worker goes underground after absconding from the sponsor. My friend who is middle class and educated and should not actually be serving tables comments that Bangladeshi boys often do not do anything back home apart from indulging in non productive activities such as politics should work hard and take up work back home especially in the garments and tourism sector to earn a living instead off coming overseas. He was nostalgic and optimistic about Bangladesh’s potential.
With a glint in his eyes, we bade good-bye, as my friend taught me more about migration than many a PhD educated human geographer in this conversion.
Expat/Migrant, a Poem
The brown migrant is stripped off agency
Compelled by fate, driven by economics
Paid lower wages, than his boss from Global North/Hence called a migrant
Although there is a hierarchy among the global south too
His pay, will support a village
While he worries for his old age
As there are no savings and social security
Hopes that his child will chart the same footsteps to Jebel Ali
As he once did from a village in Nagercoil
Fresh off college, the choice was stark
Either join his relatives business in Bhandup
Or go for greener pastures in then emerging Dubai
By mortgaging the family silver to the money lender
Fortunately he has paid it back
And manages to get home to his ailing father every 24 months
Hopes to live a normal life
His normalcy is a 10 feet by 10 room in Karama
Shared by one other cousin
In his absence, his child grows up
And recognises his father on IMO
Aspires to show where his father lives
Justifying for his absence
Also called Pravasi
Hoping to earn his nod/respect someday
More precious than all the gold at Damas and Alukkas combined