Through a post by Adnan, I got to know about Iftikhar Naseem. He is a Pakistani born poet who writes fine Urdu poems and lives in Chicago. He is homosexual by nature and it takes courage to come out, especially when one belongs to South Asian society and I admire him for that.

Recently, I issued an anthology from the library that contains a few Nazms and Ghazals written by Intikhar Naseem. I especially liked the one titled ‘mere baabaa’ (my father) in which he delves into the issue of his sexual preference. I found the poem quite touching and one can feel the pain of not being able to fulfill the roles our society has come to expect from us. The translation (for whatever it’s worth) is mine.

mere baabaa

mere baabaa
sab kahte haiN
merii shakl
aap se miltii-jultii hai

merii aaNkheN
merii peshaanii
mere hoNT
meraa lahjaa
baateN karne kaa andaaz
uThne-baiThne
chalne-phirne ka andaaz
mere haathoN kii harkat
sab kuch aap hii jaisaa hai

maiNe sunaa hai beTaa
baap kii nasl kaa vaaris hotaa hai

mere zehn meN ek savaal ubhartaa hai
maiN jo bilkul aap par huuN
to phir merii tarjiih-e-jins
aapse kyuuN is darja alag hai?

My Father

My father,
everyone says
my appearence
resemble yours.

My eyes
my forehead
my lips
my accent
the way I talk
sit around
the way I walk;
movement of my hands,
everything is like yours only.

I have heard that the son
is the heir of his father’s lineage.

A questions comes to my mind.
If I am exactly like you
then why my sexual preference
is so much different from yours?

Iftikhar Naseem

• Digital Dictionaries of South Asia with Hindi, Urdu, Tamil, Telugu, Marathi and many more.

• Webster’s Multilingual Online Dictionary with a large number of languages from around the world. It uses a more commonly used Urdu transliteration scheme compared to the venerable Platts. Also, you get to compare the meaning of the same word in different languages. Just type in the word, select non-english and click search.

I am a big IMDB fan and also a regular visitor. I think that the movie ratings at IMDB are mostly credible, mainly because of a large and random sample size of the voters involved. Since The Da Vinci Code was universally panned by the critics, I was quite interested in the IMDB ratings of the movie. It is no surprise that the movie is rated at 6.5/10 with total votes of around 25,000. What is surprising though, is the distribution of the ratings. Around 24% of the voters have given it a 10/10 rating. Such a high percentage of 10 rating is usually reserved for much better movies. Talking of Tom Hanks, his Forrest Gump has an overall rating of 8.3 with 33.4% voters giving it 10/10. For Saving Private Ryan, 31.1% gave it a 10/10 with an overall rating of 8.3. The percentage of 10 rating for some of the other Tom Hanks movies (all better than The Da Vinci Code, obviously) is much smaller:

1.) Philadelphia : 13.5% gave 10/10 with an overall rating of 7.5.

2.) Appolo 13 : 12.3% gave 10/10 with an overall rating of 7.5.

3.) Cast Away : 9.4% gave 10/10 with an overall rating of 7.3.

For director Ron Howard, his academy award winning A Beautiful Mind polled just 19.4% of 10 rating for an overall score of 7.8/10.

Does this mean that the fans of The Da Vinci Code are voting to get the movie a respectable rating at IMDB?

Did I like The Da Vinci Code? No.
Why? Because it is a very poor adaptation of a very poor book.

I didn’t like the book, so one could argue that I was biased against the movie from the word go. But still, when we have Tom Hanks and Ron Howard as actor and the director, the duo that gave us Apollo 13 together and Forrest Gump and A Beautiful Mind separately, one would expect at least an average fare. It wasn’t there.

There is always a problem with the adaptation of hugely successful books (and I am told that The Da Vinci Code has sold more copies than any other book) in defining the intended target audience. To make a movie that mainly caters to the people that have read the book or make a movie that everyone else would also understand? This movie falls somewhere in between. Avid lovers of the book would notice many important details missing and first-hand movie viewers would feel confused by many half-cooked plots. How would anyone understand the undying loyalty of Silas to Bishop Aringarosa without reading the book?

There were just two gasps by the audience in the entire movie. Both involved Silas. One was when he hits the nun, other one was when he jumps on Tom Hanks in Teabing’s house. The most important scene of the movie was the disclosure of the identity of the ‘teacher’ and it was pictured in a manner that audience didn’t react to it.

Some scenes were hilarious. Imagine this,

Sophie (inflight to London, goes over to Silas) : Diid yoo kill my grand-faather?
Silas : I am the messenger of God (or something to that effect).
Sophie (chataakh, chataakh on the cheeks of Silas) : Diid yoo kill my grand-faather?
Silas : Blah, blah, blah.
Sophie (again chataakh, chataakh on the cheeks of Silas) : Blah, blah, blah and so on.

I could almost hear Dharmendra screaming, “kutte ! kamiine ! maiN teraa Khuun pii jaauuNgaa. dishum, dishum”.

The movie is too wordy, the characters have not been developed well, there is zero chemistry between Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou (who by the way, plays her part well), the plot is half-cooked, there is no climax and in the end you just feel let-down.

Thanks to the religious groups for giving undue publicity to the movie because of which the theater was jam-packed. A movie that would have flopped anyway, might go on to recover its cost or may be garner some profit because of dont-watch-the-movie-its-blasphemous. They could have allowed people like me to come out of the theater and say dont-watch-the-movie-its-boring.

Update: There is an interesting article in WaPo on the history of church (read Catholic) protests against Hollywood in USA.