Have you watched Catherine Tate ? Furiously funny! She has this character called Lauren, the quintessential bored student who is challenged by teachers for her indifference and snaps back at them with smart and pithy and very intelligent comebacks which indicate that she is a very erudite scholar and not the insolent, indolent backbencher everyone assumed she is.
But I am not talking about that character of Tate's now.The one that went through my mind is that of a translator.She volunteers to translate at a meeting with employees from all over the world and proceeds to mock each and every person in the room with an exaggerated version of how the language sounds to a non speaker.That's it- no actual words. Swedish is a nasal monotone. Italian is high pitched, dragged out and accompanied by hand signals. Indian(she does not bother looking down at his name card to figure out the language, after all, all Indians speak Indian don't they?!)) is a single word repeated over and over again like a sonorous charm. Chinese is squeaky and loud. French, Spanish, and an African language are similarly butchered. Funny beyond words!
The people waiting for the translation are not amused, obviously, but man it was funny! I watched it quite a few times and still laugh, but it hit me, it is so easy to make fun of a culture as a whole. And it has been done for a long while.All of us do it.
Indian houses smell of curry(the sheer ignorance of that statement boggles me). As Indians know, there is no one curry-it is not a dish, it is not a spice mix, in fact the way that term is used is in itself interesting.The Tamil language has the word curry and is used loosely to mean meat with the name of the kind of meat attached in front of the word. Other than that it does not signify anything identifiable as Indian. But there we have it, ALL Indian houses smell of curry. Our clothes smell too. The stereotyping is hilariously ignorant if it weren't so hurtful.
All Indians know a smattering of English.That was something the British bestowed on us when they felt the natives were intelligent enough to be educated in their ways.Unfortunately that was their death knell. The independence movement in India was spearheaded by men educated to be barristers,who were educated in England for God's sake! Talk about hubris!
But dress in ethnic clothes and there will be someone who slows down when they speak to you just to help you understand better, because, you know, you don't know the language? I have had that experience here and found it extremely amusing.
This was on full display in the video of a Filipino guy living in San Francisco who was 'educated ' by a couple in how 'defacing' property was illegal. FYI he was stenciling in chalk, the words 'Black Lives Matter ' on his own front yard. The magnanimous lady spoke really slowly with a lot of hand gestures so the non native English speaker would understand how things are done here. She got her comeuppance pretty soon.
But what we experience here is nothing in comparison to what Black people in the US undergo on a daily basis. And that is an ongoing struggle.
With the current massively earth shaking movement going on here in the US,Vincent and I watched the movie, 'Lincoln' one more time. That was intriguing enough that I decided to read 'Team of Rivals' one more time too.
We proclaim Lincoln as THE person behind the abolishment of slavery, but I don't think that would even have been possible without people around him who had the same conviction as he did that all men were equal and could never be subservient to each other by virtue of race.
I was reading about Seward and was so taken up with his story. He and his wife were abolishionists who took a trip down south and saw first hand what slavery was all about. In fact his wife was so affected by what she saw, that she cut short their trip and returned home. But what really impressed me was the fact that Seward, in 1846, defended a Black man who had committed murder but who was obviously insane. His victims were white and the entire populace was so angered at the senseless murders that they felt that he deserved to be killed outright without even a fair trail. Seward stood up for the man and defended him in court. He faced the displeasure of the public, friends and even family with determination and with the unflagging support of his wife who sat in the courtroom every single day, he fought for justice. But what jumped out at me was this, and I'm quoting from the book:"there is not a white man or white woman who would not have been dismissed long since from the perils of such a prosecution."
That floored me.The sheer fact that we could say the same today, after almost 175 years is very discouraging. If the needle is stuck in the same place before and way after slavery was abolished, then what is progress to be defined as?
I am sure efforts have been made to help lift African Americans from the deleterious effects of slavery. But how has their effectiveness been measured? If an elected official from some southern state can say with impudence, that unlike other minorities, African Americans are used to being dependent because as slaves they had everything taken care of for them, food, clothing, medicines and such necessities, that they had never learnt to make their way through life and therefore their current plight is all of their making, that goes to show how skewed people's ideas are. Making it sound like they were mollycoddled and therefore expect the same even today is how history has been reinterpreted for the majority's benefit. To relegate 13% of the population of the Unites States as irredeemable because probably 13% of that population isn't trying hard enough seems so self defeating.
I read an article in The Atlantic titled,'The Great Land Robbery' about the systematic theft of land from about one million black families in the Mississippi Delta. Just one example of how roadblocks were placed in their march towards bettering themselves. And that probably is their fault too.
There will always be people who will take advantage of the system and try to do as little as possible and get returns on that.That is always the case. Every good cause will always have a few, or sometimes many who will try to take advantage.We see it all the time. Like that woman who used the 'Me Too' movement to clobber Aziz Ansari, the poor kid.A date gone awry was turned into a story of predatory sexual deviance, from which he still hasn't recovered. However the vast majority of women were speaking the truth.Would we negate and belittle their experiences just because of a few iffy ones?
Change needs to be made.Accountability needs to be dramatically increased. Lip service is not enough.Things need to be seen through.Hopefully,the unfair loss of lives that we have seen in the last few months will spur people to action. The ballot box is where the action needs to be.Hope and Change-we still can hope for change can't we?
But I am not talking about that character of Tate's now.The one that went through my mind is that of a translator.She volunteers to translate at a meeting with employees from all over the world and proceeds to mock each and every person in the room with an exaggerated version of how the language sounds to a non speaker.That's it- no actual words. Swedish is a nasal monotone. Italian is high pitched, dragged out and accompanied by hand signals. Indian(she does not bother looking down at his name card to figure out the language, after all, all Indians speak Indian don't they?!)) is a single word repeated over and over again like a sonorous charm. Chinese is squeaky and loud. French, Spanish, and an African language are similarly butchered. Funny beyond words!
The people waiting for the translation are not amused, obviously, but man it was funny! I watched it quite a few times and still laugh, but it hit me, it is so easy to make fun of a culture as a whole. And it has been done for a long while.All of us do it.
Indian houses smell of curry(the sheer ignorance of that statement boggles me). As Indians know, there is no one curry-it is not a dish, it is not a spice mix, in fact the way that term is used is in itself interesting.The Tamil language has the word curry and is used loosely to mean meat with the name of the kind of meat attached in front of the word. Other than that it does not signify anything identifiable as Indian. But there we have it, ALL Indian houses smell of curry. Our clothes smell too. The stereotyping is hilariously ignorant if it weren't so hurtful.
All Indians know a smattering of English.That was something the British bestowed on us when they felt the natives were intelligent enough to be educated in their ways.Unfortunately that was their death knell. The independence movement in India was spearheaded by men educated to be barristers,who were educated in England for God's sake! Talk about hubris!
But dress in ethnic clothes and there will be someone who slows down when they speak to you just to help you understand better, because, you know, you don't know the language? I have had that experience here and found it extremely amusing.
This was on full display in the video of a Filipino guy living in San Francisco who was 'educated ' by a couple in how 'defacing' property was illegal. FYI he was stenciling in chalk, the words 'Black Lives Matter ' on his own front yard. The magnanimous lady spoke really slowly with a lot of hand gestures so the non native English speaker would understand how things are done here. She got her comeuppance pretty soon.
But what we experience here is nothing in comparison to what Black people in the US undergo on a daily basis. And that is an ongoing struggle.
With the current massively earth shaking movement going on here in the US,Vincent and I watched the movie, 'Lincoln' one more time. That was intriguing enough that I decided to read 'Team of Rivals' one more time too.
We proclaim Lincoln as THE person behind the abolishment of slavery, but I don't think that would even have been possible without people around him who had the same conviction as he did that all men were equal and could never be subservient to each other by virtue of race.
I was reading about Seward and was so taken up with his story. He and his wife were abolishionists who took a trip down south and saw first hand what slavery was all about. In fact his wife was so affected by what she saw, that she cut short their trip and returned home. But what really impressed me was the fact that Seward, in 1846, defended a Black man who had committed murder but who was obviously insane. His victims were white and the entire populace was so angered at the senseless murders that they felt that he deserved to be killed outright without even a fair trail. Seward stood up for the man and defended him in court. He faced the displeasure of the public, friends and even family with determination and with the unflagging support of his wife who sat in the courtroom every single day, he fought for justice. But what jumped out at me was this, and I'm quoting from the book:"there is not a white man or white woman who would not have been dismissed long since from the perils of such a prosecution."
That floored me.The sheer fact that we could say the same today, after almost 175 years is very discouraging. If the needle is stuck in the same place before and way after slavery was abolished, then what is progress to be defined as?
I am sure efforts have been made to help lift African Americans from the deleterious effects of slavery. But how has their effectiveness been measured? If an elected official from some southern state can say with impudence, that unlike other minorities, African Americans are used to being dependent because as slaves they had everything taken care of for them, food, clothing, medicines and such necessities, that they had never learnt to make their way through life and therefore their current plight is all of their making, that goes to show how skewed people's ideas are. Making it sound like they were mollycoddled and therefore expect the same even today is how history has been reinterpreted for the majority's benefit. To relegate 13% of the population of the Unites States as irredeemable because probably 13% of that population isn't trying hard enough seems so self defeating.
I read an article in The Atlantic titled,'The Great Land Robbery' about the systematic theft of land from about one million black families in the Mississippi Delta. Just one example of how roadblocks were placed in their march towards bettering themselves. And that probably is their fault too.
There will always be people who will take advantage of the system and try to do as little as possible and get returns on that.That is always the case. Every good cause will always have a few, or sometimes many who will try to take advantage.We see it all the time. Like that woman who used the 'Me Too' movement to clobber Aziz Ansari, the poor kid.A date gone awry was turned into a story of predatory sexual deviance, from which he still hasn't recovered. However the vast majority of women were speaking the truth.Would we negate and belittle their experiences just because of a few iffy ones?
Change needs to be made.Accountability needs to be dramatically increased. Lip service is not enough.Things need to be seen through.Hopefully,the unfair loss of lives that we have seen in the last few months will spur people to action. The ballot box is where the action needs to be.Hope and Change-we still can hope for change can't we?
No comments:
Post a Comment