"Looking For Comedy In the Muslim World"

Diversity. In language. Mannerism. In speech. In contexts. Its everywhere. So it should be no surprise that people have a hard time understanding each others' idiosyncracies. Be it at the individual or family or ethno-religious or national context. A lot of times, we seem to be at logger heads. Being the curious people that we are, we want to try and understand the other.

And when we fall flat and fail to understand, it is because of one and only one reason - the effort was not honestly unbiased.

Looking For Comedy..the film, is the story of one such attempt by the American Administration to understand what causes the Muslims to laugh. Tragically, they use the means of a Hollywood comic, Albert Brooks to achieve their results, and well, the result is a comedy of errors, culture shock, and misunderstandings bordering on the comic. What is perceived as a job well done by the Brooks' character is actually a botched job that may have resulted in precipitating the already tenous relationship between India and Pakistan. (Talk about difference in perceptions).

What this movie so adeptly underscores is that, despite best efforts to actually try and genuinely understand something, when we go into an initiative inadequately prepared, the result is inevitable catastrophe. Especially when the funny guy sent in by the government has had no prior exposure to the cultural subcontexts of the places that he is supposedly scouting.

Two poignant scenes that underscore the theme of the movie happen within minutes of each other...first, the State Department cohort sent with the comic asks the comic's secretary to tell him to "break a leg". Her response..."Oh please. Thats rude." The second is when, the comic has tried in vain to get the audience to respond to some of his stand-up jokes, he asks in jest as to how many in the audience knows and understands English. And much to his chagrin, the entire audience lifts their hands up.

Two vastly different experiences - one at an individual level and another at a group level that has the same symptoms of the vastly under-rated problem - the problem of understanding and appreciating multi-culturalism. When an effort is made to understand a different culture through the same lens as we view ours, the result is a grotesque misrepresentation of the glorious concept of cultural diversity.

Looking for Comedy is a fantastic indie that atleast has the guts to hint at our seeming inability to understand diversity on its own merits.

On Education

Came across a rather interesting portrayal of education by the famed English economist John Maynard Keynes on the web earlier today...and sat down to think as to how truly it resonates atleast in my personal experience with the education systems in India and the USA.

"Education is the inculcation of the incomprehensible into the indifferent by the incompetent."

Brevity befitting an Englishman. Easily confounding just as easily comprehensible. Must be why the best education people generally receive is in the school of life.

Baseball Bliss

Now, it must be said that thanks in part to a series of collapses over the past several years (2001 to the Arizona Diamondbacks, 2002 to the Anaheim Angels, 2003 to the Florida Marlins, 2004 to the Boston Red Sox and 2006 to the Detroit Tigers), bashing the New York Yankees for their collapse is becoming almost too sad. Almost. Because it is never enough to poke fun at those Bronx bomber fans with their sense of entitlement, bordering on the obnoxious.

So, to all those Yankee-haters amongst us, ESPN.com has this veritable top-ten list of Yankee collapses. And you may note that of the ten, five happened in the last six years. Must be that baseball players now no longer believe the "mystique" and "aura" of Yankee Stadium. Must be Curt Schilling's famous quote in 2001 ("Aura and Mystique sound like night-club dancers") is coming true. Afterall, night-club dancers do have their shelf-life and then they are just consigned to dust-bins. Thanks to the fawning New York-based media, we've been treated to stories of Yankee mystique and aura etc, and of how Yankee Stadium is the toughest place to play in etc. Now, thanks the same media, we can gloat over the failure of these paper-champs. Until their next such collapse.