Police, leave them people alone?!

Naalu Policeum Nalla Irundha Oorum (4 Policemen and a peaceful town, Tamil; 2015)

Directed by N. J. Srikrishna

This full-length comedy came and went without creating much of a storm. Naturally, it received little rave review. All the actors were very green, except for Yogi Babu, who did not play a vital role here, anyway.

The story is a comedy of errors, poking fun at how the police's assertion of their importance screws up the peace of an already peaceful village.

The small township of Porpandhal is so peaceful that it has received Best Village awards for years. There is no crime, and the police station sees no need to open on Sunday. The four policemen there lead cushy lives, working from 9 to 5 and playing board games all day.

The police HQ takes notice. It plans to shut down the station and transfer its staff to Ramnath, an area notorious for serious crimes. The policemen panic. They try to justify their presence by creating petty issues here and there.

Little did they expect what would finally pander with their little tweaking. They send out a petty thief to steal the village committee's collection monies, making the police appear as heroes when they retrieve the loot later. They hoped this would prevent the police station from closing and allow them to maintain their leisurely lives.

Unfortunately. the money that the thief stole got burnt in a fire. The committee chairman accuses the shopkeeper whose shop was razed by fire as the thief and of lying by purposely burning down his shop to hide evidence.

When the police tried to intervene by making the temple priests as mediators, a stash of dirty magazines was found planted in the temple grounds instead, angering the temple committee members. They, too, go ballistic against the rest of the villagers.

At the end of the day, the once exemplary peaceful village now becomes a war zone. Everyone ends up in arms against one another. The policemen, though, get their wishes fulfilled. They stay put.

Everyone is trying to prove their worth. A doctor is worth his degree only if people fall sick. A mechanic will be out of a job if everyone's vehicle is maintenance-free and immune from breakdowns. In the same way, lawyers will be jobless if no one runs afoul of the law. Lawyers may also turn a non-issue into a national crisis; leave it to them. The same goes for the police, too; so much power and nowhere to flaunt it can be pretty intimidating.

Respect is earned. People are free to respect each other if they think their existence is respected. Try greeting a random guy on the street. Invariably, he would reciprocate your salutations unless he suffers from paranoid schizophrenia or believes there is a catch.

The moment the other party thinks that he is taken for a fool and feels cheated or discriminated against, that is when all human decencies end. The experiment was done by a third-grade school teacher, Jane Elliott, in 1968 after Martin Luther King's assassination highlighted this effect. She wanted to show how it felt to be discriminated against. The all-white class was divided into two groups- the blue-eyed and the brown-eyed. The blue-eyed students were given preferential treatment and compliments. The experiment was reversed but only lasted two days. From the short experiment, she found how easily people deemed 'inferior' fitted into the role so quickly and saw how fast the mild-mannered students in the 'superior' 'group became devils.

The lesson learnt here is that everything is honky dory when each other's liberty is respected. He flips when one's position is threatened or feels he is taken for a pushover. The suppressed reptilian mind awakens, and like Pandora's Box, evil thoughts and actions will be unleashed. All shields will be up to ward off anything that resembles hostility. The societal-imposed social inhibitions go out of the window!

May not! The Wokes and BLM sympathisers seem to scream from the depths of their lungs to de-fund the police. They argue that having a police squad is damaging to the existence of the minorities in the country. Alternative? Let looters have a field day, businesses finding it not cost-effective to apprehend or persecute offenders with minor thefts or simply close their retail stores and opt for online businesses only. 

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Sticking to the same narrative?

American Fiction (2023)

Screenplay & Direction: Cord Jefferson

It seems that we have not changed much since our days as cavemen. Imagine living exposed in a world so hostile we would have tried to understand the unusual things around us. We continued compartmentalising the living and non-living things amongst us even when we became hunter-gatherers, farmers or city dwellers. By compartmentalising everyone in boxes, we thought we had our defences up to remind us which one of them was friends and which were potentially harmful. Gone are club-carrying or sabre-rattling days, but these classifications helped somewhat.

The Chinese viewed anyone non-Huns as barbaric. So did the Greeks, Persians and Arabs. During the mercantile era, the dark-skinned were labelled as God-sanctioned slaves. 

In the USA, post-Civil War America assumed that the emancipated slaves were ill-prepared to fit into modern society. They expected them to remain the subservient ones. They were prevented from getting into mainstream business, education and even usage of common public amnesties. In their own stride, the Blacks did prosper. Records showed the presence of significant numbers of black entrepreneurs and millionaires all through the late 19th century. There were pockets of prosperous descendants of slaves. Such a vicinity was Tulsa in Oklahoma. Like the Osage Nation, there were abundant automobile-owning, well-suited professionals there. Tulsa was fondly called ‘The Black Wall Street’ because of the burgeoning business activity there. 

Resentment was building up there. They could not fathom a subjugated community doing well. So when a white shop assistant cried foul when a black man allegedly pulled her hand. There were many versions of what transpired there, from a lover’s quarrel to miscommunication. Before the due legal process could take its course, the mob decided that he should be lynched and the black residents needed to be torched. It resulted in much property damage and about 600 lives lost. 

It is a cognitive dissonance. The majority wants to continually stereotypically paint the marginalised as the downtrodden, irreparable group of people forever trapped in the loop of melancholy, tragedy and hopelessness. They assume the marginalised groups will be stuck in the muck forever without recourse for improvement. Well, there is news for them. Collectively, many have leapfrogged from their Sisyphus-like struggles and bootstrapped themselves to prosperity. 

But the world is stuck in its own ways. By adhering to their old narratives, the non-marginalised ones give a pat to themselves, thinking that they are serving the marginalised by bringing their plight to the fore. The truth is that that is a fiction, The American Fiction. The liberals believe that representation among minorities is only valid if the narrative follows a preset traditional stereotype. Any deviation from this would nullify the voice of the majority. The reality is that the world has changed, but not the thinking of some. 

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Guilty by default?

Emergency (2022)

Director: Carey William

Sikhism is professed by 25 to 30 million worldwide and is the fifth-largest religion in the world. Even though Sikhs constitute only 1.72% of India's population and 1.02% of the world's population, they are instantaneously recognised, not only by their unique appearance but also by their industriousness and successes. In India and the rest of the world, wherever they migrate, their proportion of poverty, as compared to other groups, remains the lowest. Outside Punjab, some minorities still excel without political assistance. Reaching foreign shores as economic migrants, they generally prosper and outperform other immigrants. They blend well into society and have the tongue to learn to speak the local lingo swiftly. Pretty soon, they will be sitting in professional bodies.

The Sikhs are often seen by community leaders as a shining example of how societies should progress. Someone toyed with the idea that lack of political representation and state assistance are the very things that help them propel forward.

Hence, in Malaysia, the recently perceived 'lack of Indian representation' in the Malaysian Cabinet is a non-issue. There is no need to depend on handouts from the top. The community itself should pull itself with its own bootstrap. As the Senior Economist Thomas Sowell advised, when people get used to preferential treatment, equal treatment seems discriminatory. He also concluded that affirmative is ineffective. He likened it to a wrong medical diagnosis and prescription. His research had repeatedly shown that blacks in America were better off in many social parameters before the Civil Rights Law was passed in the USA. As he is often quoted to have said, "When people are poor, they want communism or socialism, but when they are rich, they think capitalism is best!"

All that is fine at a macro level, but day-to-day human interaction does not work that way at the ground level. Power dynamics and racial stereotyping are a mainstay. The presence of little Napoleons and power brokers is everywhere. The decree from the top gets lost in translation, purposefully or like the game of 'Chinese whispers'. 

If George Floyd has taught us anything, dealing with the enforcement unit is more complex. Split decisions made in an encounter are anything but easy. The police see the other as a potential criminal who would harm him or escape. If he made a wrong call, he would be negligent or, worse, lose his life. 

The person on the end of the police baton would be apprehensive that he would be pigeonholed based on his ethnicity or appearance. In his mind, he is assumed to be guilty by default. Any wrong move, and he is a cadaver.

These thoughts go through the minds of three friends who aspire to go places as they almost complete college. The three friends, two blacks (Kumle and Sean) and a Hispanic (Carlos) find an apparently stoned white teenager in their home. Like black South Africans in the apartheid era, they panicked. They decide to take the kid to the hospital in their SUV. Kumle, the studious one, has his life all mapped out. He is going to Princeton come fall. Sean has had a previous bad encounter with the cops, and Carlos has consumed intoxicants and is flying high like a kite.

While cruising en route to the hospital, they encounter a police roadblock. Suddenly, it dawned upon them how they might look to the cops- three coloured people kidnapping a drugged white teenager! Then begins the cascade of confusion as they avoid police custody, escape the victim's sister and friends, but most of all, not in any way jeopardise their future. The last thing they want is to be just another statistic in the ever-expanding number of victims of police brutality. 

This film is supposed to be a comedy, but the subject matter deems anything but funny!

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Preying on the past?

Descendants (Documentary; 2022)

Written and directed by: Margaret Brown

We often tell us to put the past behind us and use the past as lessons to propel us forward. Refrain from brooding over the past, but look at the future, which is within our means to write. The past is a done thing which cannot be rewritten. 

Is there any merit in prodding the past and trying to write the wrong that our ancestors did by omission or commission?

This documentary makes one thing of this very point. Can we blame all our misgivings on how our ancestors were treated? Is transgenerational PSTD justified enough to be the reason for the current generation to be dysfunctional, economically backward and in a quandary? Is validation of the deeds of our forefathers needed for us to prosper in life? Or is the mere lack of their recognition just an excuse to remain as sluggards?

It is good to put the facts straight. As history is written as dictated by the victors, their version is just one aspect of what really happened. A big chunk of what the losers experienced will inevitably be lost in the annals of times. It is good to know the other version, but are we duty-bound to correct the past, to right the wrong? 

Then there is the question of the descendants of the historical aggressors being penalised for the misdeeds of their ancestors. Are they culpable of their sins? Then, there is a question of reparation. Is a simple apology sufficient? Whenever there is money involved, the intention is always suspect. 

A poor part of the area around Mobile, Alabama, called Plateau, had a local tale. Local folks have been saying that they were descendants of more than 100 captive Africans who landed at the shores of the town on a particular slave ship, Clotilda, way back in 1860. The legend goes that, even though slavery was outlawed in the US in 1808, the clandestine international slave trade was very much alive. Slave ships would arrive on the shores of Mobile in the cover of darkness. Slaves would disembark off the shores and make a beeline to the overgrowth, leading to the slave traders' den. The ships would be burnt off so as not to leave any evidence. 

This trade ended after the Civil War ended, and the Emancipation Declaration was passed by Congress in 1865. 

The descendants of slaves and slaveowners carried on with their lives. Many of the affluent people of the area may have benefitted from the slave trade, whilst many of the slaves' downlines remain downtrodden and poor. Some would have left the nest as well. The family of Timothy Meaher, the owner of Clotilda, still possess their old estate and many parts of the town. They remain secretive about their ancestors and their activities. 

Word has it that some slaves who were freed from slavery lived in an area called Africatown and had plans to return to Africa but never really made it back. The present generation still lives in their memory and yearns to connect with them, perhaps via their belongings. As the African tradition dictates, people communicate through their personal belongings. 

Tracing the remains of Clotilda was a challenge as the site of their last whereabouts proved elusive for lack of documentation. They had some film footage and written interviews of the last living slave on the Clotilda, Cudjoe Lewis, by America's first Black female filmmaker, Zora Neale Hurston. Her book about Lewis, Barracoon, was published in 2018. It was used as a reference in this documentary.

Clotilda

A group of divers found a piece of Clotilda's wreckage and positively identified it as the 1860 ship. 

The excitement then began. The question of Africatown/ Plateau and Mobile being a tourist destination and how the vicinity would prosper came to the fore. In a town hall discussion, the question of reparation sneaked in, too. 

The point to remember is that whatever stimulus package or economic opportunities are handed out, the occupants of the lower rungs of the food chain rarely grab their chance. The high-heeled would grasp no matter how difficult the odds are stacked against them. 

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Bitter pill to swallow!

Aftershock (2022)
Director, Producer: Paula Eiselt and Tonya Lewis

In the 70s, active labour management was the craze in the Obstetrics circle, especially amongst the countries that looked at the UK as their point of reference. This kind of treatment was first tried out at the Royal Dublin Hospital, promising short labours, lower caesarean section rates and safer outcomes. It soon became the golden standard of managing parturient mothers in most labour rooms.

There had been debates on whether Dublin's figures and definition of labour were only agreeable to some. Many argued that the system tends to over-medicalise something quite natural that people have been doing for aeons. Medical intervention tends to involve surgical intervention, it is alleged. Unfortunately, with eyes constantly scrutinising for clues to stir dirt when a medical outcome is not to their liking, medical practitioners tend to practice defensive medicine. Better be safe than be bogged by handling complications, a battery of legal suits and the threat of being struck off the register.

An often overlooked and unmentioned fact about Dublin's 'active management' is that mothers had a named midwife with them, i.e. a midwife who sees her during pregnancy and through her labour. Labouring mothers are at ease with a familiar face besides their partner. It is said to allay anxiety and generally gives a feeling of achievement. This is why many opt, in the West, at least, for homebirths or at birthing centres.

This documentary is about two maternal deaths which occurred within a short span of time within a locality. In October 2019, a 30-year-old, Shamony Gibson, died two weeks after her delivery of pulmonary embolism. The family allege that her initial symptom of breathlessness during pregnancy and after delivery was trivialised. In the second case, in April 2020, Amber Rose Isaac had to be induced for worsening liver functions and low platelet (HELLP syndrome). She had to undergo an emergency Caesarean Section. Unfortunately, she died on the operating table with extensive haemorrhage. The family was unhappy that the staff were late detecting her medical condition.

One might say it is a medical misadventure. In this time and age, people unfortunately still die during childbirth. Somehow, the BLM (Black Lives Matter) movement needled its head to push for the family to rally to demand justice. They find a disproportionately high number of Black women are failed by the US maternal system. After infiltrating every nook of society, the BLM movement and their leftist friend have something else to stir true.

The widowers of Gibson and Rose Isaac form a strong bond and rally to highlight their plight through rallies. They seek systemic change in the medical system and legislation to ensure proper care.

[PS. One thing often overlooked is that the population is marred with the problem of obesity. Obesity carries high morbidity in any medical condition or intervention. Pregnancy, when the body is in a hypercoagulable state, brings forth even more danger. No medical practitioner worth his salt will ever talk about this to a plus-sized patient for fear of being accused of body shaming.]

[PSS. As medical services become more expensive, compounded by the fear-mongering drive of the pharmaceutical and allied industries. In this increasingly litigious climate, when over-investigation is necessary, medical services are at risk of being exclusive to the rich. The WHO's cry for primary medical attention as a human right remains, at best, can be only given at the bare minimum. Restricting expensive treatment to the deservingly ill but can ill afford is the bitter pill to swallow. Sadly the patients who need the therapy most are those not financially able to pay. The bow has to break somewhere]

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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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