Everywhere you lay your hat...

The Indian Detective (Canadian Miniseries, in Hindi and English; 2017)
Netflix (Season 1, E1-E4)

The 1950s were important in world politics. The Second World War was over, but the world, never learning from its past mistakes, was building another. The world was divided into two, those subscribing to capitalism or communism. The Cold War was brewing. The newly independent nations, the Third World, was up for grabs. In that environment, in 1955, a few countries got together in Bandung, to assert that they were not aligned to either side of the fence. The Americans, however, viewed it as the ranting of the newly-independent third world states with a slight socialistic stance as they were not invited but China was.

One of the prescient thing that the then Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai had said was that the Chinese residing in different countries should show their allegiance, not to China, but to the countries they are residing. 

That too must be applicable to the Indian diaspora which is spread the world over. Driven to the four corners of the mainly for economic reasons and the colonial masters' labour needs, they had 5easily embraced into the cultures of the newfound motherlands. In some cases, they had even cut their umbilical cord off the country of their forefathers. They may be Indian on the outside or by name. The connection to Mother India ends there.

Generation elapsed. Indianness became diluted. The head-boobing went the same way as the subservient nature of their ancestors. For them, their grandfather's guest country became their motherland. They shared fond memories, their childhood, experienced pain and joy and shed a tear or two when their nation was under attack. So to accuse them of showing more loyalty to India rather than their country of birth is mischief or not inciteful.

This Canadian production is a mediocre one. The story is quite predictable and paints India in the same brush as most Hollywood movies. We are all bored with the stereotyping of a corrupt police force, abuse of power by officials, of arranged marriages and a dirty and polluted India.

The drawing force to this flick must have been Russell Peters and  Anupam Kher. Even they could not save the film. The acting is unnatural and forced. The dialogue is cheesy and the storyline implausible. William Shatner guests as a baddie but he remains a pale shadow of Captain Kirk. He does not explore any facial expressions beyond the emotionless and bland facies that he puts up in most scenes. The producers put up a cliffhanger at the end of Episode 4 but, obviously, the miniseries did not garner such a following to demand another season. 

Just for the record, the story is about a bumbling constable who is suspended for a month for bungling up with a drug bust (or was he?). He is forced to visit his 'ailing' father (Anupam Kher) in Mumbai. Here he gets entangled with an Indian mob and a social worker cum lawyer. See how this Mumbai gang is intertwined with his Canadian case and how the detective (Russell Peters) comes out smelling of roses. 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Of Moral Courage and Ijtihad...

Allah, Liberty and Love (2011)
Author: Irshad Manji


Thanks to the religious authorities of Malaysia, this book received free publicity after the seizure of its Malay translation. This author was almost unknown when the English version was out in the Malaysian bookstores. The moment the Malay version hit the shelf, all hell broke loose. That, in turn, drew many a curious mind to delve into her work.

Manji is an unabashed Muslim lesbian who drew many a flak from professors of the religion. She is quite comfortable with her sexual orientation and has no qualms in practising her belief as she sees fit. The purists, however, are up in arms, literally with her as they believe that unconventional sexual practices are condemned to the highest order in the scriptures. As the sole purpose of conjugal relations is procreation, to them, same sex relationships are a no-no. Period. Based on this point alone, all her intelligent arguments are rejected wholesale.

Manji is one the preachers along the line of Mu'tazilas who teach people to use their thinking faculty, ijtihad, before accepting anything into their belief systems. She encourages people to build the moral courage to voice out what they believe in and not to be cowed into submission without an intellectual discourse. Most religions in the world are happy to have its congregations to be uniform in their thinking, practice and acceptance of a standard set of rules of what is right and what is not. They look at uniformity as unity, engaging in debates as divisive and that division is heresy. The need to conform had numbed the moral courage to stand for oneself.

She argues that freedom of religion is not a Western construct as King Cyrus of Persia is said to be the first monarch to allow religious freedom. None of the modern values that are hailed by the younger generations is Western in origin. All good values are interrelated just like how Gandhi got his idea of passive resistance from Henry Thoreau (an American poet philosopher who authored 'On the Duty of Civil Disobedience'), as for how Emerson was inspired by the Eastern wisdom and Martin Luther King Jr planned his fight against racial segregation from Gandhian ideology.

From her writings, I find her to very smart and knowledgeable of many areas of interests. Unfortunately, some of my Muslim friends utterly reject her rhetorics, saying that she is ignorant of her facts. Sadly, they accuse her of tarnishing the good name of the religion and copping out to its enemies.

She makes a distinction between culture and faith, a trait blurred in today's practice of the faith. A person does not have to follow a particular culture to profess a religion. Culture is human-made, not God-given but religion is a divine relationship between human and his Maker. We should also accept that no one is perfect. We all err in our day to day practice. Just as we are offended by others in our daily duties, we must take care not to hurt others. We are quick to blame others for our misfortunes without, for once, reflecting upon our shortcomings and faults.

As uniformity is an important aspect of the religion, just like the five pillars of the faith, I can understand why some of my friends are upset with her views. She is quite happy with her unorthodox method of praying and frequency of prayers in a day. She also highlights particular cherry picking of verses from the Holy Book without highlighting other contradictory ones. Then there are the 'Satanic Verses'!

An interesting verse I picked up from the book is by Martin Luther King Jr, "If a man had nothing to die for, then he is not fit to live." Funny how this verse can be picked by the morally and ethically vacuous jihadist to meet his course just as much as Manji uses it to stir moral courage to voice out their convictions! Everything is just perspective.