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So much of a role model!

 King Richard (2021)
Director: Reinaldo Marcus Green

By now, everybody would have heard about the movie 'King Richard', not because the leading actor, Will Smith, won the Oscar but the slapping of the host, Chris Rock. Many are arguing whether the showdown was staged. Will Smith, walking up to the stage to smack Rock for cracking an off-colour joke about her alopecia, was really uncalled for. Behavioural specialists and body language experts have been working overtime to analyse, frame by frame, the demeanour of Smith, his wife Jeda and Rock to surmise that it was not staged. 

This movie is a biopic about the untiring efforts of Richard Williams to make world-class tennis stars out of Venus and Serena. Richard, a pushy father, steamrolled himself to get trainers for his daughter. A slave driver, he did not want his daughters another statistic in the sea of black children with social issues. He abhorred violence and was bullied by the local hoodlum.

It is ironic that Will Smith, who won his role as Richard, behaves in such a non-acceptable way. His action does not augur well with his status as an advocate of 'Black Lives Matter'. It just reinforces the stereotyping that blacks are violent people. Verbal abuse can be reflected with wit.

It is said that, in the early 1900s, Swami Vivekanda was in a canteen in the UK. He went to sit at a bench where his Professor, a white man, was seated. Seeing the Indian man about to share his bench, he rebuked, "You know a pig and a bird cannot sit together!". Almost instantaneously, Swami Vivekananda replied, "it is quite alright, I can fly away!" and went away before the Professor knew what hit him.


How people look at us is in how we make them look at us. This Singaporean driver used a jack to tilt the car so that it could fill more petrol, to stretch his Singapore dollar at a filling station across the border in Johore Bahru. This action just reinforces the public (non-Singaporeans) the perception that they (Singaporeans) are more like country bumpkins - thrifty, penny-wise and just uncouth. One cannot blame Johoreans if they form a poor opinion about their southern neighbours if this is what they see week over week.
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Location: Kuala Lumpur, Federal Territory of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia

Comments

  1. (in)sane mind5 April 2022 at 23:37

    Well, if you see we got to see two side of the same coin(blacks as a race) If Will Smith acted as a jerk, there was Chris Rock who was absolutely classy AND restrained. If I was in his place I would have made sure that the Smith was put behind bars.

    ReplyDelete
  2. rifle range boy6 April 2022 at 15:02

    If I were Chris Rock, I also would not have pursued the issue further. As it turns out, Chris rocked and turned out to be the bigger man! Like Hanuman, one has to choose his battles carefully, in my humble opinion.

    ReplyDelete

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