First Caribbean-made film on Cricket is complete.  It is also the first Barbadian film to be marketed internationally. I couldn’t find more details about the director Alison Saunders-Franklin, but the film sounds pretty interesting with its international crew and funding completely through PE.

Hilarious!

I have never really managed to find an answer to this question. When a myth has been told and retold through centuries, morphed, twisted, wrongly translated, bits forgotten and parts exaggerated, who can really claim ownership? Do I have a right to depict my own interpretation?

If so, then why is HinduJagruti.org out to claim that Nina Paley’s animated Sitayana is “disrespectful and denigrating to Hindus at large”? For instance, how “factual” was Doordarshan Channel’s depiction of the myth (with arrows that split up in hundred other arrows and two arrows colliding in mid-air and destroying each other)?

Check out the letter from HinduJagruti.org that I found on her website:

“Ms. Paley,

Some irate Hindus have brought to our attention your attempt (“Sitayana”) at retelling the Hindu Holy epic, Ramayana ( www.ninapaley.com/Sitayana).

Here are our concerns regarding your attempt:

Ø It appears that you are not fully aware that the Ramayana is a Holy Scripture for Hindus. Over a billion Hindus all over the world hold it in reverence. What you call as the characters in Ramayana are divine Incarnations worshipped by Hindus.

Ø While we understand your painful personal incidents discussed on your site, your “Sitayana”, which basically re-tells the Ramayana as matches your own life, is contrary to the life of Lord Rama and Goddess Sita as given in the Hindu Holy texts. Thus, even if inadvertently, your “Sitayana” has proved to be deliberately disrespectful and downright denigrating to Hindus at large.

Ø One cannot understand divine Incarnations by trying to fit them into limited human paradigms. It takes rigorous spiritual practice to attain the spiritual maturity to understand and experience the attributes and functions of divine Incarnations.

Ø Even if one were to hold such views in private, out of lack of knowledge or understanding, you have gone on to publicly display your views on the World Wide Web. To publicly comment on something held in reverence by many, one should have some authority on the subject. Kindly let us know what spiritual authority you exercised to publicly alter and mock a Holy spiritual text revered by millions?”

It goes on and on. Check out the rest of it here.

Link from Rohit Gupta — Tarantino and Rodriguez pick movie poster’s here.

I am also a big fan of Bollywood posters from the 70s. Recently, I came to know from a friend that the artists still live, only getting business from b-grade Indian films. The market for this seems pretty much close to death. Long ago, I learned to paint from an artist who started his career on the streets of Kolkata painting film posters and shop walls.

Alas…!

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Will DRM Die Today?

“Will DRM die today? In five hours we’ll find out. At 1 PM London time today EMI CEO Eric Nicoli and Apple CEO Steve Jobs will hold a forty minute press conference. Lots of press were invited early this morning to attend, but no information was distributed other than “to hear about an exciting new digital offering.”

The Wall Street Journal seems to know a bit more, though. They say (behind a paywall) that the two are set to announce that a significant portion of EMI’s catalog will be sold online without any DRM. EMI is the third largest music label after Universal and Sony.

Labels like DRM because users can’t easily copy songs to give to friends. Users hate DRM because they are locked in to one device or service. Earlier this year Jobs wrote an open letter to music labels calling for them to “abolish DRMs entirely.” In that letter he noted that only 22 out of every 1,000 songs on the average iPod, or less than 3%, were purchased from iTunes. The rest were ripped from CDs and obtained illegally.”

From Techcrunch.

So, I went to the FICCI Frames 2007 Conference in Mumbai. Very crowded, and thronged by media industry from across the world. Interestingly, there was only one talk on UGC (User Generated Content), and everyone kept talking about DRM and IPR and such kind of primitive crap.

I don’t understand when the TV industry is going to realize that UGC is actually beneficial to them, and stop pretending to have control. On one hand we have a rapidly growing mobile market with high-res cameras, along with hundreds of site which make it easy to post content. On the other hand, we have a small group of TV industry crowd trying to cope with loss of content control.

I tell you, humanity could have achieved the “Back to the Future”, “2001 – A Space Odessey” world, only if we weren’t spending billions of manhours trying to deal with myopic viewpoints.

Heck. I should just stop ranting probably, and go edit some videos or write some perl.

Just had this article in Guardian forwarded by a friend:

“In the rigidly patriarchal society of the remote mountain villages of northern Albania and beyond, they have a unique way of providing a head of the household when there is no male heir, or the men of the family have died in battle. A girl – or her parents – may declare that she has become a “male”. From then on, she – now he – will be brought up and dressed as a boy/man, perform male tasks and mix socially as a male with boys. He will become the head of the family, organise the division of labour and wealth, be permitted to carry a weapon and uphold the family honour in blood feuds.

It has always been assumed in this region that every unmarried female is a virgin but, with a change of gender, the “sworn virgin” swears to celibacy for life (traditionally an oath to this effect was taken in front of a dozen village elders – all men, of course). He may never revert to the gender of his birth. In this way, inheritance of the family home and land is assured in a society in which women may not inherit property.”

Bizarre.