Memoirs of a wimpy kid

Not only has my pre-tween boy read all 12 Wimpy Kid books, watched various movie versions, played the board game, and been through various activity books, he has convinced me to read (by which I mean listen on audibles) a few.  They are fun.  It’s not hard for me to see a bit of my own wonder years in these stories.

Of course, my tweens were in the 1980s Dhaka, not modern American suburbia.  My teen years were in international schools in the tropics, owing to my father’s job.  I was in high school (in the American sense) at the same time as the gang from 90210.  A quarter century before social media, our social lives were shaped by and mirrored what we watched on the tele.  It was appropriate years before Rage Against the Machine penned — Cinema simulated life in trauma / Forthright culture, Americana / Chained to the dream they got you searchin’ for……

Imagine then how old I felt when watching Dylan McKay grounding his teenage son in Riverdale.

Now, here was an idea — take the key characters from a comic book set in the happy days and set them in a town that must be the twin of Twin Peaks, this was stuff of inspired imagination.  I found the first few episodes of Riverdale riveting, but then somehow lost track.  I guess these days, if it is not binge-watched, it’s hard to watch at all.

Well, I wouldn’t at all recommend binge-watching the other Netflix teen drama from 2017.  Then again, I found the show quite padded, and just-not-good-TV, so I wouldn’t really recommend it at all.

But even a bad show, sometime, makes you think.  

How many shades of hypocrisy?

Guest post by F Rahman

Too much learning is a dangerous thing – it was an op ed by Mehnaaz Pervin Tuli published by the Daily Star on 2 Dec 2016.  The author tried to show, using satire, the daily struggles of women who are meant to never speak up and are thus shouted down when they actually do. 

The satire was missed by Dhaka’s chatterati, and there was a large hue and cry in the social network.  Incensed, Farhana Rahman wrote the following.  The Daily Star agreed to print it, and then changed their mind, pulling Ms Pervin’s original piece from their website instead. 

Hypocrisy comes in all shapes and sizes in Dhaka. This is just another one…

JR

Every culture has it.  Every race has it.  Every era, including our own, has had it.  We have it too.  When you look within yourself, how many shades of hypocrisy do you see?  Of course, I cannot answer that question about anyone but myself, as I am no one to judge. We all should be the judge of our own selves and all the shades we bring along.

So was perhaps what this writer tried to do – perhaps she was looking within herself to see the life of us, as women, as a daughter, as a sister, a wife, a mother, a home maker, or a professional, and at end of the day, just a person.  A writer whom I never heard of, I came across her on facebook, when a friend commented on her piece that has been shared randomly.

I was curious despite the seemingly bland title of the article. (By the way, I think my title is equally bland. Solidarity!).

So she thinks too much learning is a dangerous thing.

She attempts portraying the typical female life in our everyday society, within her household and outside: the different roles she plays and juggles at every step of her life; and how they affect each other. She goes on to further detail how the complexity of our interlinked but different faces are all too often overlooked by people around us whom we save on our call-list as friends and family.  Forget any hope of real support, she reminds us how callous our F&F can be at the time of need!

We have talked enough about the brother getting the big piece of fish and husband getting the fish head or some versions of such, so I don’t want to bore you by explaining that bit – you get the context. Our writer here goes a step further and points out how even just by being a female in Bangladesh we are taken for granted to put on a number of faces, and then simply expected to live each of them with utmost perfection.  And just because we are women, we are not meant to speak up under any circumstances, even if we appear to wear our faces superbly.

As if being a perfect daughter, sister, wife, or a mother – which are supposed to be the only valid roles society had long deemed for us females – isn’t hard enough, the writer mocks how we seem to be deliberately making our own lives even more miserable by facing the outside world with (un)necessary further roles.

We know that there is no easy way, no chance of mistake, no one to lean on or no one to turn to. People will stand by the side, watching, and they will pretend applauding you as a successful woman, but one simple slip up is all that’s needed to reveal their true faces – the hypocrisy within them.

So my unknown writer friend tries expressing her frustrations and disappointments on all the above with “humour”.

Guess what?  It seems she slipped up!

How dare she, with her bad English (as if every other op ed writer in Bangladesh is an Oxford debater)!

Why couldn’t she be just happy with whatever faces she has to hold. Not only she dared to express her opinion, even worse, she made it to the newspapers in Bangladesh.

And from there, all hypocrisy just broke loose.

Sometimes life puts you in a spot that’s so bad that you have to just laugh at things.  It was pretty hilarious discovering how many of us didn’t take a breath criticising the writer’s education, background, or motive, while completely ignoring the fact that we ourselves lacked total empathy to hear the cry of a wounded heart.  Our reaction seemed to be less about what she wanted to say, but whether she had the eligibility to say anything.

I simply couldn’t stop wondering since when did we need “eligibility” to speak our mind! It amazes me that we are ready to reject someone just because she couldn’t express her thoughts “correctly” or offer any solution to our situations.  She dared trying mockery instead and apparently failed to “capture on a foreign language” her satire, never mind the exclamation mark at the end of her article!

How many shades of hypocrisy?  Tricky question.

We are either hypocrites, or we are not.

We cannot keep lecturing in our stuttering, heavily accented English on International Women’s Day to a room full of men about uplifting women, empowerment, justice or such big heavy words, and then go criticising someone who happens to be a woman, for being brave enough to speak her mind on issues we dare not touch, in whatever language she knows to whatever standard with whatever background she has.

When we do that, the shade is solid hypocrisy.

Gone Girl

 

What are you thinking?  How are you feeling?  What have we done to each other?  What will we do?

The primal questions of any marriage — says, Nick Dunne (Ben Affleck) as David Fincher’s 2014 adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl begins.  Wrestling with the unravelling of own marriage, the questions came as a jolt as I watched the scene in a lonely hotel room after a long day of work.

A decade of marriage, and you realise you don’t know who your partner is.  Worse.  You don’t know who you are anymore.

What have we done to each other?  Indeed!

Coffee House

As every educated Bengali knows, decades before a bunch of photogenic New Yorkers made it trendy, hanging out in a cafe — the Coffee House was cool.  Hanging out — adda –with your friends after work, who can’t relate to that?

The Manna Dey classic suggests the great experience mid-20th century Calcutta would have been for young guys — the Art College graduate drawing sketches for marketing firms before making it to Paris, the reporter who would migrate to Dhaka (and write a great book on 1971), the Goanese guitarist who died young, the amatuer actor suffering from a romantic tragedy related breakdown, the unrecognised poet with cancer….

… and the girl….

Ah, yes, the girl…. the one who is supposed to be happy because she has a millionaire husband who buys her jewellery….

Ray’s Big City wasn’t a great place for women.

Much of the subcontinent still isn’t.

 

সাতকাহন

Seven trashes collected by the senses.  Well, bonus holiday edition of 20 trashes.

সাতকাহন

Seven trashes collected by the senses.

সাতকাহন

Seven trashes collected by the senses.