Andheri

admin — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 23:53:00 +0000

This short film was Sushrut Jain's final project at the USC School of Cinematic Arts. He plans to expand the character study into a feature length film. Shot on the street in a Mumbai suburb of the same name, Andheri does an exceptional job of communicating what it feels like to walk down the street in urban India. Every movie with an Indian scene seems to have a few crowded streets where the camera jostles and token cows, beggar children, and colorful saris move through the frame. Granted, all that does happen on the street in India, but unlike Bollywood movies, Western studio productions, and poverty porn films (ahem, Slumdog Millionaire), Andheri's street scenes are mundane. No men with painted faces carry a pile of cloth the size of a Volkswagen on their heads. It does not happen to be Holi when people throw colored powder all over each other. Unless creepy old men on buses are an icon—and perhaps they are, although not a particularly Indian one—this film is devoid of cliché. Ignoring these pointed images of India, Jain seems to have just held a camera at waist level and taken a walk on a random weeknight.

The story is of a young woman (Swati Sen) employed, apparently for her whole life, as live-in maid to a rather grotesque woman (Daisy Irani) obsessed with soap operas and a good foot soak. She is disrespected, but not (in this version of the story, at least) abused, and seems well taken care of, however limited her options. The movie hints at all the themes that Indian cinema and films about India generally hit on—caste and social order, poverty, Muslims, romance, and the shackles of tradition. Should our heroine make a break for it?

Out on the street a whole potential alternate life opens up. The short film takes place in that suspended period when you've made your move, but there is still time to turn back. The story, Jain has explained, came from the stories he heard from maids, working people, and other underground characters in India. Andheri's plot was loosely based on one story he had heard, the teller of which got to take part in the filming.

In Indian cinema a film like this is called a "realistic." Funny that a very obvious word becomes a tag line. Although, as in the West, the action flicks and canned rom-coms will always dominate, there is the opportunity now for personal stories to find an audience.

Andheri has been well received at festivals, winning official selection at over a dozen events this year. It was shot with a relatively small crew of about twenty on. Go figure, a random weeknight in Mumbai. Jain is, in addition to expanding the story of Andheri, working on a coming of age comedy about boys taking their board exams, but all they want to do is start a heavy metal band.

Written by: Ann Raber, September 23rd 2009

Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men

admin — Thu, 30 Jul 2009 23:04:00 +0000

By Dr. Leonard Sax, MD, PhD

Basic Books

Most of the attention Dr. Leonard Sax gets is for his advocacy of single sex education for boys. In his first book, Why Gender Matters: What Parents and Teachers Need to Know about the Emerging Science of Sex Differences, Sax described the developmental and biological differences between the sexes and how contemporary early education puts boys at a disadvantage. In his follow up, Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men, Sax elaborates on the modern crisis of maleness.

Sax is interested in boys, and tends to ignore females except as counter-examples, which is fine because one cannot be all things to all people. Sax also, in spite of himself, writes about a certain class of white affluent suburban boys. He tries to allay critics on both of these counts, with sometimes hilarious results. In explaining how inclusive his work is of all cultures, Sax offers this compelling example:

“Emily (or Maria or Shaniqua) goes to college...Justin (or Carlos or Damian) may go to college...” I am still laughing. Maria, Shaniqua, Carlos, and Damian? Are we seriously playing a "Let’s think of Black- and Latino-sounding names" game? At least Sax is trying to fill the ethnic diversity requirement, even if he has a clunky way of showing it.

Regardless, the focus of Boys Adrift is the plight of affluent white boys living in American suburbs with a few generations of American living (read: consumerism and apathy?) pumping through their veins. “Damian” is actually not his concern. But whomever he is speaking about, Boys Adrift was written from Sax to parents.

From a hyper-academic kindergarten curriculum that favors females, to phlalates that leach into your Dr. Pepper and stunt mental development, Sax covers the basics of what we're talking about when we're talking about the modern crisis of manhood. He identified this crisis of boys as a “failure to launch,” an epidemic of fat, Halo-playing man-children who don't understand why everyone keeps telling them that they should move out of their parents house.

Gender issues aside, Boys Adrift would interest anyone seeking a comprehensive history of Attention Deficit-Hyperactivity Disorder and its treatments and the various, terrifying ways that environmental estrogen has infiltrated our bodies, wreaking physiological (early puberty in females) and societal (sexually mature girls in school alongside their prepubescent male peers) havoc on post-baby-boom generations.

The educational problems that Sax describes are applicable to kids of all kinds (even, dare I imagine, Shaniqua), and it's a little annoying to see them attributed to gender difference. Pegging problems like a struggle to pay attention and a failure to get decent grades to a condition of maleness might feel good to parents of a struggling boy, but to a female who failed similarly, it seems wholly unhelpful if not insulting.

There is a lot here, and Sax's work will comfort many parents, but the work is not without some contradictions. Early on in the narrative we learn that modern American schooling is not conducive to male brain and body development—it does not play to their strengths or their timetable. Later, Sax cites a statistically notable decline in boys’ intellect since the 1990s. The statistics rely on grades given in school. But if school works against boys, then their grades in school are not a fair or accurate measures of their intellect, so what use are they?

Recommended for those curious about education, gender, boys, men, and environmental estrogen.

Written by: Ann Raber, July 30th 2009