muslim superheroes

Comics to Battle for Truth, Justice and the Islamic Way

by HASSAN M. FATTAH
Published: January 22, 2006

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates, Jan. 21 - For comic book readers in Arab countries, the world often looks like this: superheroes save American cities, battle beasts in Tokyo and even on occasion solve crimes in the French countryside. But few care about saving the Arab world.

If Naif al-Mutawa has his way, that is about to change. Young Arabs will soon be poring over a new group - and new genre - of superheroes like Jabbar, Mumita and Ramzi Razem, all aimed specifically at young Muslim readers and focusing on Muslim virtues.


More at:
www.nytimes.com/2006/01/22/international/middleeast/22comics.html?ex=1138597200&en=fbbf842ed9a7779c&ei=5070

sicky-poo

I am sick with flu. Again.

I really don't know what it's been in the last 4 years that has made me become so sickly. It seems like i have a cold or flu at least once a month or so nowadays. I drink lots of water, try to eat a respectable amount of fruits and vegetables, and have started washing my hands more often. Maybe it's lack of exercise. My new plan is to start exercising again after i get better.

By the way, Memoirs of a Geisha was a pretty lame movie: 3 Chinese lead actresses playing Japanese women in struggling Japanese-accented English, cardboard and undeveloped characters, exoticisized Japan (it was all cherry blossoms + silk kimonos + picturesque bridge-over-ponds), oversimplification of geisha's lives, and particularly stock characters for the women (the struggles between the women were portrayed more like cat-fights, women in this movie are once again bearers of long-suffering love, etc.). Such a waste of talent for all the leads, who acted marvellously despite their limited roles. And good violin music from Yo-Yo Ma. But not worth the 8 bucks.

i love fish curry

yes i do. just had it for lunch. damn, it's good.

anyway, my interviews went well for the most part yesterday. the magazine one was hard; she asked a lot of tricky questions. like how important is editorial integrity to you? would you be willing to sacrifice it for the sake of advertisers? ofcourse, my answer was 'no', but my mouth gave a more complicated answer that the interviewer seemed quite satisfied with. apparently the magazine market is really saturated here cos the population is so small, and everything, i mean everything, is driven by advertising $$$. not that it's much different anywhere else, but at least there are more alternatives. interviewer #2 also told me what salary to ask for when i do the second interview with her boss later this week, so i think she might have liked me.

unfortunately there was no baby time this weekend cos the relatives decided to come yesterday instead. might go see them tonight.

i just finished reading the Interpreter of Maladies by Jhumpa Lahiri, which i've been meaning to read for a long time. she totally deserved the Pulitzer; the writing is immensely beautiful. she writes really well about middle class Bengali diasporic communities. no clever turnings of phrases like Rushdie or hard-hitting social commentary like Marquez, but definitely worth a read.

meanwhile i am still slogging through UTA 2 (that's Upping the Anti, a really cool new journal that everybody should read). actually Lahiri was a way to procrastinate on reading UTA. i mean, there are so many people saying so many intelligent things in it that sometimes it just makes me feel stupid and wonder why i'm being asked to contribute to it at all. like the himani banerjee interview was really really engaging, but i think half the things she said flew over my head cos i haven't done the theoretical reading. i know, i should just fucking do the theoretical readings. or i could just go watch 'memoirs of a geisha'.

talking about movies, i am totally psyched cos Brokeback Mountain is opening in Singapore on Feb16. i am very pleasantly surprised. Singapore's not exactly well-known for its tolerance of homosexuality. maybe things are changing.

i just found the button that enables me to add links and am having fun with it in this post.

the slogging finally begins to pay off

I have 2 job interviews on Monday!
One is for a receptionist and the other is for a writer and editorial assistant at a mothering magazine. Am really nervous about them, but glad too. I've been sending tons of job applications every day and it's getting tiring lying to people about great i am.

I think my mother is disappointed in me that after she's invested so much (financially and psychologically) in sending me to university, i still can't get a 'good job'.

Last night we had some really good South Indian food for dinner. I had a Cheese Dhaniya Thosa. (translation: dhaniya means coriander, thosa is a south indian bread that is kinda like a crepe) It was really really good. I even brought my parents' digital camera with me to take a picture of my food so i could post it on here, but i was so distracted by the thosa that i completely forgot about the picture until we'd finished dinner.

Anyway, i think my uncle and aunt who live in Malaysia are coming down this weekend to visit with their 1-year-old. So i get to play with a baby all weekend.

go AR

www.deccanherald.com/deccanherald/jan152006/national1949202006114.asp

Arundhati Roy rejects honour

Celebrated writer Arundhati Roy on Saturday refused to accept the prestigious Sahitya Akademi Award in protest against the Indian government toeing the US line by "violently and ruthlessly pursuing policies of brutalisation of industrial workers, increasing militarisation and economic neo-liberalisation".

The jury of Sahitya Akademi last week chose her book, The Algebra of Infinite Justice, a collection of political essays, for the 2005 literary award.

IMF/WB here in September

"Stamping out trouble

Caning and imprisonment await violent protestors at the upcoming International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank meetings to be held in September this year."

Read more at:
www.todayonline.com/articles/95790.asp

job search blues

I got my first request for an interview today. It's for a position with a free local arts and entertainment magazine (kinda like the Georgia Straight, but with less annoying ads). I went from being super-excited to super-depressed really quickly. Why? Because the offer is for a 3-month full-time internship: unpaid. While i'm sure it would've been fun and great experience, it doesn't really solve my problem of not having any money.

I can't decide if it's more alienating to be exploited for your labour or to be a lumpen.

In other news, it appears i'm gonna have my first opportunity to vote ever in my life. All signs are pointing towards an election, although a date hasn't been announced yet. Am kinda looking forward to it actually. I mean, theoretically i know how pointless it is, but i'm curious about the process and i think it could be a little cathartic as well. It'll be interesting social investigation i'm sure.

hail MLK

I think it's rather ironic that i found out that Bhagat Singh was born in the same town as my grandmother on Martin Luther King Day. The town is Lyallpur, named after some British general dude Lyall. Now it's in Pakistan and called a different name - Faisalabad, after yet another ruler (King Faisal).

My grandmother is pretty cool. So was Bhagat Singh. And so was MLK. I just think it sucks when people are iconocized (?) into essentialist categories. Like 'Bhagat Singh was a violent revolutionary'. Or 'MLK was a nonviolent gandhian pacifist'. It really does a great disservice to the trajectory of their lives, the movements in their political thought and action.

Anyway, hail MLK, hail Bhagat Singh, hail ordinary folk like my grandmother, and long live the memory of their inspirational lives.

Singapore Rebel

So there's this short doc, about 25 minutes long, banned in Singapore, called Singapore Rebel. It's about opposition politician Chee Soon Juan and his challenges trying to organize through a political party here. You can view the whole video at:
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8057768553173785296&q=singapore+rebel

Even if the voiceover talks way too quickly sometimes and the narrative is short and very focused on this individual, it's a very compelling film. Censorship laws in Singapore prevent the release of any local film that deals with party political politics or is deemed to be partisan or that deals with race and could ignite stronger racial tensions.

The filmmaker, Martyn See, has now made another political film called Zahari's 17 Years, about journalist Said Zahari, who participated in Singapore's struggle for independence and was arrested in 1963 for allegedly being a communist, then detained without trial for 17 years.

The more i am reminded of Singapore's colonial and initial postcolonial history, the more striking it is to me how, in just 2 generations or so, things have changed so much as to have been so successful in stifling dissent and militant radicalism.

Bummer.

This is Miffy, the household dog. Don't be fooled by her size - she will not hesitate to bite. She bit me the first day that i got back here. It was quite sneaky actually. She came up to me and put the side of her body right by my leg, giving me the impression she wanted me to pet her. But the minute i did, she turned around and bit me on the foot before i could figure out what was going on! I think we share a common trait - we both have trust issues and need to be really clear about boundaries. This makes me like her a lot. Plus she is really cute when she's squashing a bug and playing with its dead body. Okay, she's cute when she's trying to get me to play ball with her too.

unfaithful

Watched a Bollywood movie on dvd last nite: Bewafaa. Basic storyline: girl meets boy in canada (montreal), girl's older married sister comes to visit with news that she is pregnant, girl's sister gives birth to twins and dies in process, girl makes decision to marry sister's brother and be the twins' mother, moves to india and gives up everything she knows to live with an unresponsive but super-rich husband, 3 years later girl's ex shows up in india and she is once again left to struggle with dilemma of responsibility/family honour versus self-satisfaction.

So problematic i don't even know where to begin. Canada was all beautiful and shit - full of scenic waterfalls, pretty mountains and lush green landscapes. And then when the twins were born, there was a white nanny - yeah right, as if that ever happens in Canada. And don't even get me started about the dilemma the woman was in. First of all, the whole pressure to marry your passed-away-sister's husband thing is totally fucked up - hello? how bout the husband learn to take some responsibility for doing the unpaid reproductive labour for a change. And then at the end, when all relationships are revealed and she has to make her 'final answer', she says "i may be unfaithful to my lover; i may be unfaithful to my husband; but a mother can never be unfaithful to her children." nuf said.

Most of the songs in this movie sucked too, except for one qawaali about memory which i kinda liked. I don't know what it is about Bollywood movies that keep drawing me back to them even if they're so sexist and classist and often caste-ist and communalist too. But then again, much of Hollywood is just as problematic. As a friend loves to put it, it's all just good brain candy at least.

my blog

Holy shit, i have a blog. I am so slow with new computer technology, but it was easy enough getting to this stage. Hopefully this blog won't be too boring or ugly. We will see.