Will Scarlet writes in.
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I have been having a number of fascinating discussions on accents, especially in the context of Bollywood, over the last few days. The issue came up once again that Bollywood actors usually have people dub in for them. In other words, that voice you hear may not be that of the actor herself. Saheli had a great comment on Sepia Mutiny some months back on dubbing and accents that popped into my mind as I was thinking about this post.
Just to bring in a different perspective: Michelle Yeoh can't speak proper Mandarin to save her life. But one of her most famous movies was Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which is in Mandarin. Born in Malaysia, her first languages are Malay and English, and her Chinese is Cantonese. Someone--sometimes even Ang Lee himself-- would have to write out the day's shooting script in pinyin (phonetic Chinese) and help her pronounce it. She would spend hours memorizing lines phonetically, and when Ang Lee would change the script during shooting she would have minor nervous breakdowns. This in a physically demanding role and after a broken knee. I'm told that her accent was audible and distracting even to American-raised Chinese who are non-Mandarin dialect speakers themselves. Knowing all this, Ang Lee--who had plenty of fx tech available to him--still used her voice, with sync sound. And I've never heard someone complain about her accent vehemently enough to suggest he should have dubbed her; they still wanted Michelle Yeoh to do the acting. I think this speaks to the extent to which most directors take sound and voice incredibly seriously. There's a great making-of on the Harold and Kumar DVD mocking this seriousness, but it can be mocked to good effect precisely b/c it's real and important. Now, Ang Lee might not have taken so much trouble with a lesser actress, or for a lesser film, but all things being equal, it was obviously important to him. And she worked really hard to fit in with that priority. Ever watch the making-of portions of the latest Chinese exports? The sense of artistic discipline and drive you get from the actors is amazing. Takeshi Kaneshiro works in three languages (Japanese, Cantonese, Mandarin), and read up on archaic Tang Era expression. so he could inflect his Mandarin properly.
Now that's a very different market structure from Bollywood, and a very different class of films. It requires a lot of time and effort, a real market for that kind of quality, and a good script that is solidified long before shooting to base your preparations around. It's absolutely unfair to compare Sarkar to House of Flying Daggers, for instance. But even the highest production value, lovingly scripted films like Devdas and Lagaan often seem to lack that final buff of perfectionist polish. A good counterexample: it's really inspiring to watch Monsoon Wedding and hear the director's commentary; which lines were spoken in Hindi, English, or Punjabi was all carefully thought about.
To build on Saheli's comments a bit: part of the reason for this is the way the Bollywood industry is structured. Organizationally, Bollywood is not organized into studios but is rather a network-organized set of independent producers.
As is often the case, the organization determines the process. In Bollywood, the process is not nescessarily executed in the usual fashion - starting with a script, and then moving on to casting, and then production. Actors are often doing several movies at the same time. Dubbing is often used since the leader actors often don't have the time to deploy their own voice. Directors pay another person for the dubbing since it is rather cheap to get a decent dubber. The end result is that the actor's accent is not faithfully reproduced.
I am not arguing that this is a good thing, but rather that it is an artifact of the organizational structure. Things are getting more organized, but given the way Bollywood is structured today, how would things change? How would you get "Bollywood" to recognize a problem such as this and act upon it? A key problem here is that you don't have command and control flows like in a typical hierarchical structure. Would mass media help? What would blogging about it or writing about it in newspapers cause to happen? Bollywood is probably going to continue doing what they have been doing all along. That is, zilch. Zero. Nada. (Unless, of course, there is a consumer-side push.) There have been complaints about Bollywood being kitschy for years, but little has changed. Personally, I expect these aspects of Bollywood to persist. Dubbing, songs in the rain and many many other aspects of Bollywood are going to be around for a bit longer. I think it is best to make peace with that!
Will Scarlet writes in.
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Saheli Datta links to a Matthew Yglesias post on Obama which starts off with "The fact that Obama's had this kinda sorta wrapped up since March 5". (Saheli is back to blogging again. Yay!).
It's a fundamentally bold, hopeful brand of politics. And I think it's no coincidence that that theme's been at the center of his campaign. Relative to Clinton, you see two people with similar policy agendas. But Clinton comes from a school of politics that says liberalism can't really win on the questions of war and peace, identity and authenticity, crime and punishment. It says that we live in a fundamentally conservative nation, and that the savvy progressive politician kind of burrows in and tries to make the best of a bad situation. It's an attitude very much borne of the brutally difficult experience of organizing for McGovern in Texas and running for governor in Arkansas at the height of Reaganism. Relative to McCain, Obama thinks it's possible to accomplish things in the world. He thinks the United States faces a lot of serious international challenges, but doesn't see them as primarily driven by menacing and implacable foes. Obama thinks that a combination of visionary leadership and shrewd bargaining can greatly improve our ability to tackle key priorities without any great expenditure of our resources.
All in all, the pessimist in me sees it as an approach to politics designed to set us up for a hard fall when it fails.
Arguably, Obama had it wrapped up as early as March because - all said and done - he has had the numbers since then. A"super-delegate candidate" would not, in my mind, have been terribly democratic in any case, and so in the end, the right candidate has been chosen.
I really hope that the Hillary supporters will end up swinging around to Obama. The failure of some of Obama's policies - as I suppose some of them inevitably will fail - will not nescessarily turn me into a pessimist about Obama. And surely, it is too early to count one's omelettes before the eggs have hatched and are broken. The question, to me, is still if the alternative is any better. Here is a graph with the employment numbers over the past 14 years, which sufficiently makes my point.
Friar Tuck writes in.
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Uma Mysorekar, President of the Hindu Temple Society of North America, was on the Colbert Show, that bastion of investigative journalism. It seems all too usual for segments on Hinduism to do a not entirely adequate job, and this one was no exception. I was not quite satisfied with Mysorekar's comments on Hinduism. (Nor, for that matter, with all of Colbert's one liners. It is not quite true that Hindus don't eat meat. A significant fraction do.) Mysorekar's comments didn't quite cut it. Perhaps it represented her own Hindu tradition, but I don't think that her remarks made for an accurate representation of the religion as a whole.
An issue that must be dealt with while dissecting Hinduism is the problem of essentialism. While the most popular varieties of Hinduism are essentialist, it cannot be said that all varieties of Hinduism are essentialist. Hinduism is not necessarily bound to an essentialist approach. This makes it impossible to make definitive statements about certain aspects of the religion. Hinduism has possibly as much diversity within it as other religions have between them. Belief in God, for instance, is not a single position under Hinduism. It spans a range of positions from atheism to agnosticism to polytheism to monotheism. The Hindu tradition includes a whole range of traditions, each of which has its own particular beliefs on the matter. Mysorekar's opinions are just those - her own personal opinions on what Hinduism is.
Samanth will be starting a new column over at the Mint called Raagtime. His first piece entitled "Change and Continuity" is absolutely lovely.
In my mind, for many years, the word “classical” evoked a vision of Ancient Greek or Roman statuary: pristine, stern, inflexible marble, the very literal example of being “set in stone.” The classical arts are popularly imagined to be just as unyielding, not to be sullied by any stray influences. An image that daunting can, and does, put people off; just as unfortunately, it can also be thoroughly misleading.
Carnatic music shows how a classical art can also be an open and pliant art, and how change and evolution can be the breath of life, rather than the kiss of death. There’s no doubting its classicism, of course. Many of the ragas in Carnatic music today derive from the musical “moods” of Tamil music from the first few centuries of the Common Era, and notable scholarship dates back to at least the 17th century. This is an old, old art.
But the quintessential Carnatic music concert today is a product of the times it has passed through. The violin, for instance, is an integral part of the ensemble today, but it was introduced into Carnatic music less than 200 years ago, when it rode the wave of European influences that crashed on Indian shores.
Other alien instruments have been accepted, even by relatively conservative audiences, with an alacrity that is both surprising and pleasing. U Srinivas began playing Carnatic music on the mandolin in 1978, and today he plays to a packed Music Academy, in a prestigious evening slot, during the December Season. Kadri Gopalnath plays Carnatic music on a saxophone as golden as his regulation kurta. R. Prasanna is so indelibly associated with his instrument that he is simply known as “Guitar Prasanna.”
For more, step over to the Mint's website.
Bonnie Blue Butler had the situation come up at work where they had to find a good way to translate the English word "guarantee" into Hindi. This was a real-world marketing problem, and eventually they decided to go with "gaaranti", the word "guarantee" transliterated into Hindi.
I discussed it with her and I think it was the right thing to do. Now, this may be a pedantic point, but I must assure you that Hindi does not lack for an equivalent to the word "guarantee". Noting that Hindi owes its roots to both Sanskrit as well as the Middle Eastern languages, there are two separate vocabularies and therefore there are at least two different ways to express the word 'guarantee' in Hindi. One equivalent is the word "zamaanat". Another equivalent is the Sanskrit-nisht word "prathyabhoot". The problem for the marketers, of course, is that neither set of words may be particularly accessible. Given the complex linguistic situation in South Asia, the transliterated English word "guarantee" is likely the best bet.