BAR DANCERS AND DIFFERING PERCEPTIONS

An important feature of a rally organized by bar owners against police raids in Mumbai on 20 August 2004 was the emergence of the bar dancer. A large number of girls with their faces covered were at the forefront of the rally holding up placards with blown up pictures of semiclad Bollywood stars. It was a statement questioning the hypocritical moralilty of the state and civil society. […] The media reported that there were around 75,000 bar dancers in the city of Mumbai and its suburbs and they had organized themselves into a union to resist police raids.

The mushrooming of an entire industry called the ‘dance bars’ had escaped the notice of the women's movement in the city. Everyone in Mumbai was aware that there were some exclusive ‘ladies bars’. But usually women, especially those unaccompanied by men, were stopped at the entrance. So many of us did not have any inside information regarding the bar dancers. But the 20th August rally changed all that.

Soon after the rally, Ms Varsha Kale, the President of the Bar Girls Union approached us (the legal centre of Majlis) to represent them through an ‘Intervener Application’ in the Writ Petition filed by the bar owners. During the discussion with the bar dancers, it emerged that while for the bar owners it was a question of business losses, for the bar girls it was an issue of human dignity and right to livelihood.

In 1970, after two decades of European exile broken only by his brief return in 1957–58 to make Touch of Evil–one of the many films a Hollywood studio took away from him–Orson Welles (1915–1985) came home to Hollywood to make his last feature, The Other Side of the Wind. Funding the production largely from his own pocket and shooting entirely outside the system, the fragmented filming finally wrapped in 1976. Thirty years on, the movie, infamously, remains unedited and unreleased, bound up by bad luck, personal feuds and byzantine legal tangles that saw the negatives actually physically locked out of reach in a vault in Paris for decades.

In the intervening years, as scratched and smuggled clips and script extracts have leaked out, Welles' final film's legend has grown. Shot on the run around L.A. and in Arizona, with a reportedly dazzling central performance from John Huston, the movie tells a story that strangely parallels its own making: the doomed tale of an embattled, aging, old-school director, trying to make a film to compete with the sex-and-symbolism flicks of the young guns of the New Hollywood of the early 1970s. A movie about making movies, it has become the Holy Grail of Welles' career, his Rosebud–perhaps the slyest, most mystifyingly revealing statement he ever committed to celluloid.

Welles spent the last decade of his life fighting to have his film released. Twenty-one years after his death, that fight goes on.

Introduction

Within Europe, there is a contradiction between the progressive image of the Netherlands and its local practice. The country has been portrayed as an overly generous wealthy welfare state with progressive forms of citizenship, evidenced by legislative acts concerning a number of areas such as euthanasia, gay marriages and drug use. Politically, the relatively active civil society, the long history of party coalitions and the tradition of a so-called tripartite ruling have formed an image of tolerance and mutual respect. A close examination of these progressive legislations reveals a nuanced interpretation of the notion of ‘citizenship’ with practical consequences on gender and race relations. Whereas legislation concerning gay marriage and euthanasia bases itself on the notion of rights and duties between the individual citizen and the state, in the domain of care, the notion of rights and duties are displaced from this relationship and cited in ‘citizen-to-citizen’ relations.

Although north European welfare states have been undergoing similar demographic and economic changes that led to reforms and care policies have acquired features of ‘citizen-to-citizen’ relations, the Dutch experience shows that issues of care have less political visibility and the nuclear family is particularly emphasized. For instance, in Scandinavian countries, public debates on private and unpaid caretaking activities have led to gender neutral forms of public and private care provision.

INTRODUCTION

The world is now characterized by extensive and rapid movements of people. An increasingly important issue for industrialized countries, such as Australia, is the rising number of people who are becoming displaced within their homelands as a result of a multitude of interconnected factors. The majority of displaced persons and refugees in our region are women and children. Yet, they are severely underrepresented in refugee determination processes, claims for asylum and settlement. This paper will examine women's experiences of forced migration and the neoliberal global context in which they occur. Over the past two decades the implementation of neoliberal policies in both the north and south have not only resulted in colossal displacements, but have simultaneously given rise to exclusionary politics. While globalization conjures up a vision of a borderless world, as a result of free flow of goods, this paper will show that increasingly nation states have closed their borders to the displaced, emphasizing the distinction between ‘economic’ migrants and political refugees.

[…] The persistent dichotomy of internal and external displacement, and the failure to classify as refugees those who have not crossed an international border, despite the escalation of their numbers in developing countries in the Asian region exemplifies the Eurocentric nature of refugee discourse. The complex processes of decolonization and increased integration of the world economy have set in motion large-scale population movements that render meaningless distinct categories of dislocations.

Introduction

This chapter tries to compare the social settings of elders within intergenerational relationships in Colombo, Sri Lanka and urban Holland. It mainly focuses on the so-called ‘private contract’, while occasionally referring to the so-called ‘public contract’. Finally, it refers to some preliminary results of visiting senior homes in Colombo of all religious backgrounds, while mainly focusing on the women inmates of two established Buddhist homes in Colombo (in total, data from 27 homes were collected).

These terms have been taken from the comparative study of Akiko Hashimoto on elders in US and Japan (1996). With the public contract, the focus is on the elder as a citizen and forms of state or commercial provisions. With the private contract, the focus is on the relations an elder has with family, a wider circle of friends, neighbours, acquaintances and community. For me, the value of Hashimoto's approach is her perspective of viewing the two contracts as a continuum – the public contract and policymaking equally being part of the social–cultural realm.

Comparison and Intergenerational Relations

Akiko Hashimoto's comparative study on Japanese and American perspectives on ageing provides a framework within which to reflect on expectations of family relations next to expectations of governmental services, both of which are (partly) taken for granted within one sociocultural and political context. Thus, specific sociocultural settings (can) differ in certain crucial respects.

Abbas Kiarostami (born 1940) is the most influential and controversial post-revolutionary Iranian filmmaker and one of the most highly celebrated directors in the international film community of the last decade. During the period of the 1980s and the 1990s, at a time when Iranians had such a negative image in the West, his cinema introduced the humane and artistic face of his people. Kiarostami has been involved in the making of over 40 films since 1970, including shorts and documentaries; he first attained global critical acclaim for directing the Koker Trilogy (Where Is the Friend's House? [1987], Life and Nothing More… [1991], and Through the Olive Trees [1994]), A Taste of Cherry (1997) and The Wind Will Carry Us (1999).

Kiarostami belongs to a generation of filmmakers who created the so called “New Wave,” a movement in Iranian cinema that started in the 1960s, before the revolution of 1979. Directors such as Forough Farrokhzad, Dariush Mehrjui, Sohrab Shaheed Saless, Amir Naderi, Bahram Beizai and Parviz Kimiavi were the pioneers of this movement. These filmmakers had a number of techniques in common, including the use of poetic dialogue and of allegorical narrative as a way of dealing with complex political and philosophical issues. They were followed not only by Kiarostami, but also by Mohsen Makhmalbaf, Bahman Ghobadi, Jafar Panahi and Hassan Yektapanah.

As I write this, the Indo-Dutch Programme on Alternatives in Development (IDPAD), jointly implemented by the Indian Council of Social Science Research (ICSSR) in New Delhi and The Netherlands Foundation for the Advancement of Tropical Research (WOTRO) in The Hague, comes to an end after 25 years of successful research collaboration between researchers in India and The Netherlands. The findings reported in this book come from a large project titled, ‘Care of the Aged: gender, institutional provisions and social security in India, The Netherlands and Sri Lanka’ carried out with the financial support of the IDPAD.

Since 1981, IDPAD had five phases of research competition to which both Indian and Dutch scholars were invited to submit proposals on different themes of development issues and selected the best 20 to 25 proposals at each phase for funding. In the first phase (1981–4), IDPAD funded 17 proposals on the five research themes: Small-scale industrialization, Export-oriented industrialization, Multinational Corporations, Dairy Development and Women's Studies. The Centre for Development Studies (CDS) and IDPAD have worked together since its inception, however, from the second phase to the fifth phase, CDS faculty members always held research projects with IDPAD.

In its second phase (1985–9), IDPAD funded 19 proposals on research themes such as New International Economic Order, Comparative Perspectives of Asian Rural Transformation and Recent Trends in European Society.

The toughest interview for me ever to get was with Clint Eastwood (born 1930). My meetings with John Wayne and Sam Peckinpah were tough, but Clint was the toughest.

I had taught a course on Eastwood's films at a university where I spent my teaching career, and I took shots from some alumni who thought he wasn't a fit subject. Of course, he was. And, as time has passed, he has proven to be even more so.

I had tried for 30 years to get an interview. One time I called one of his people and played my trump card. I mentioned how well my interview with Wayne had gone. But my trump card was blown away.

“Mr. Eastwood hates John Wayne,” the man on the phone said curtly. Oops. I felt like collateral damage between two icons at high noon.

Intermittently I made further overtures–I sent Clint a book of poetry signed by Robinson Jeffers, the poet of Big Sur, Monterey, Carmel, and environs. But I imagine it never got to him; it probably wound up on eBay.

Finally, fate smiled. Rob Burke, one of my former students, had become vice president for marketing and creative services for Lakeshore International. Warner Bros. turned down Eastwood's project Million Dollar Baby, but when Lakeshore agreed to do it, Warner Bros. changed their mind and hastily signed on.

In January 2003, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada stated in his report for 2001–2, to the Parliament that:

These are extremely harsh words, when expressed by an officer of Parliament with a majority government in the House. The Commissioner was referring to various acts or draft legislations of the government, all prepared in the aftermath of 11 September:

• Canada Customs and Revenue Agency's new passenger database;

• The unrestricted access by Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) to all information that airline companies collect on their passengers and its transfer to foreign authorities under the Aeronautics Act;

• Dramatically enhanced state powers to monitor our communications, especially international ones;

• A possible national ID card with biometric identifiers, as advanced by the Citizenship and Immigration Minister, on the model of that which has already been adopted for permanent residents; and

• The government's support of precedent-setting video surveillance of public streets by the RCMP.

Melvin Van Peebles (born 1932), the godfather of ghetto-punk cinema, has assumed many personas in his decades-long career as an artist and self-reinventing iconoclast. But he long ago earned cine-immortality as the writer-director and revolutionary spirit behind Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song, the independently financed, anti-establishment 1971 film that broke box office records and established, for better and worse, the lucrative template for blaxploitation film. Made for $500,000 (including a $50,000 contribution from Bill Cosby), the film depicted a mustachioed sex-show hustler who goes on the run–and keeps running–after assaulting a pair of racist cops. Even with its fragmented, Nouvelle Vague-style aesthetics and a daunting MPAA rating (“Rated X by an All-Whyte Jury” was the movie's tagline), Sweetback's made morethan $10 million upon its release, mostly from African-American audiences who had never before seen such a vivid, angry expression of black-rebel consciousness on the big screen.

In May 2004, I sat down to chat with Van Peebles and his actordirector son, Mario (born 1957), whose own projects (New Jack City [1991], Posse [1993], Panther [1995]) reflect a conscientious attention to racial disparity, civil rights history and the persistence of hoary old African-American stereotypes in mainstream Hollywood film. The pair were in New York promoting Baadasssss! (aka How to Get the Man's Foot Outta Your Ass!) (2003), Mario's Oedipal docu-fiction homage to his father's personal struggles in making Sweetback's, in which he cast himself as Melvin and his own son as a 13-year-old version of himself.