Genre: War/Action | Year: 2014 | Duration: 138 mins | Director: Angelina Jolie | Medium: DVD | Trailer: HERE | Language: English | My rating: 5/5
Favorite Dialogue:“A moment of pain is worth a lifetime of glory.”
Unbroken is based on an inspiring true story of Louis Zamperini, a World War II bombardier, and an Olympic athlete whose remarkable life story is chronicled in Laura Hillenbrand’s bestselling book, Unbroken: A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption (2010). The film is a powerful tale of human spirit and forgiveness.
The story follows Zamperini (Jack O’Connell), who survives a plane crash in the Pacific Ocean, captured by the Japanese navy and endure years of brutal treatment in prison camps. The film spans Louis’s early life, childhood and his troubled youth, athletic achievements, and his experiences during the war, first as a Bombardier and then as a POW.
Jack O’Connell delivers a compelling performance, capturing both the vulnerability and strength of Zamperini as he faces unimaginable hardships. The supporting cast, including Domhnall Gleeson as fellow soldier Phil, and Takamasa Ishihara as the sadistic camp commander “The Bird,” contribute significantly to the film’s emotional weight.
Angelina Jolie’s direction is visually stunning, emphasizing the stark contrast between the beauty of nature and the brutality of war. The cinematography portrays the vastness of the ocean and the starkness of the prison camps, effectively immersing the audience in Zamperini’s harrowing journey, combined with Alexandre Desplat’s evocative score.
“Unbroken” excels in showcasing the inspiring and intensity of Zamperini’s ordeal, making it a powerful portrayal of the strength of the human spirit. However, the film differs from the original book in balance. While the book is more focused on his post-war journey of forgiveness and healing, the film focuses more on his suffering.
Overall, Unbroken is a visually compelling and emotionally charged film that pays homage to Louis Zamperini’s extraordinary life, and is certainly a must watch. For me, the DVD of this film is a collectible too.
“All you need do, is be content with what you’ve got, to be always craving more, is a demon’s lot.” ― Amitav Ghosh, Jungle Nama
“Jungle Nama” by Amitav Ghosh is a captivating verse adaptation of a Bengali folktale from the Sundarbans, the world’s largest mangrove forest shared between India and Bangladesh. Written in a lyrical, rhythmic style, and illustrated by Salman Toor, the book tells the story of “Bon Bibi,” a benovelent goddess of the Sundarbans who safeguards the jungle and its people, and her conflict with Dokkhin Rai, a powerful demon-like figure who seeks to exploit the forest’s riches.
Ghosh’s decision to render this ancient tale in verse brings a unique musicality to the story, echoing the cadence of oral storytelling introducing music to current speech that has kept the folktale alive for generations. His prose is imbued with both reverence for the source material and a contemporary sensibility that makes the story accessible to a modern audience. Accompanying the text are hauntingly beautiful illustrations by artist Salman Toor, whose work enhances the mystical and otherworldly atmosphere of the Sundarbans and its lore.
Beyond its enchanting style, Jungle Nama explores timeless themes of balance between nature and humanity, the perils of human greed, and the importance of respecting natural boundaries. Ghosh subtly draws parallels to modern issues like climate change and environmental degradation, suggesting that the ancient wisdom in the Bon Bibi story holds valuable lessons for today’s world. Through Bon Bibi’s character, he raises questions about stewardship, sustainability, and the price of human ambition.
The book is more than a poetic retelling; it’s an immersive experience that connects readers to both nature and folklore. Ghosh’s evocative language and Toor’s illustrations work in harmony to capture the spirit of the Sundarbans and its lore, making this book a visually and intellectually rich addition to Ghosh’s body of work. The poem-like style of the book follows twelve syllables in each line, and each couplet has twenty-four syllables. After each line there is a natural pause or a caesura, replicating the cadence of the original legend.
This book by one of my all-time favourite authors is a mesmerizing read for anyone interested in myth, poetry, linguistic hybridity, and environment, offering a rare glimpse into a world where nature and spirituality are deeply intertwined.
Genre: Action/ Adventure | Year: 2008 | Duration: 109 mins | Director: Roland Emmerich | Medium: VCD (BIG Home Video) | Trailer: HERE | Language: English | My rating: 2.5*/5*
Favorite Dialogue:” D’Leh (Steven Strait) [in the pit, to Saber-tooth]: Do not eat me when I save your life!”
Roland Emmerich takes the sciences of evolutionary biology and anthropology and turns them into fiction. This film was actually so historically inaccurate that not even the giant ostrich attack & sabre-tooth scene made up for it. As the film progressed with the voice-over of the narrator (the legendary Omar Sharif) telling that this is a “story of blue eyes” and all the trappings that come along with magical realism, it became clearly obvious that 10,000 BC is a bad ripoff of Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto. It seemed as if Emmerich had lost all sense of time in 10,000 BC, as the film showed Egyptian pyramids being built using woolly mammoths, ships, horseback riding, and Steel. It’s ice age in 10,000 BC, and then the hero D’Leh (Steven Strait) walks over a hill and suddenly he’s in the Nile Valley of 2,000 BC! Was Emmerich trying to put in a further taste of science fiction through time travel?
After an attack on their village Yagahl, by ‘four-legged demons’ (horse-riding slave raiders), D’Leh and his mentor, Tic’Tic (Cliff Curtis), brave the snow-capped mountains, forests with dinosaur-like ostriches, wide savannah and parched desert in search of those who were abducted along with D’Leh’s beloved Evolet (Camilla Belle). In between this journey, D’Leh has to learn to fulfill his destiny as a leader to save his people.
This awfully directed and archaeologically inaccurate drama can be avoided.
India has huge natural bamboo stocks that have been an integral part of Indian culture for many millennia. Bamboo in many ways is the mainstay of the rural Indian economy, sparking considerable social and ecological spin-offs. In the early part of the century, large tracts of bamboo occurred in many parts of the country but were treated by the forestry sector (which was then cast in a production forestry mode) as a weed of little economic value and was used mostly by the rural communities for crafts, making implements and as housing material. It was the discovery of bamboo as a source of long-fiber by the Forest Research Institute in Dehradun that started the process of using bamboo in a variety of industrial applications, so far unexplored, with several paper mills and rayon mills being set up. But in the absence of a clear policy there was rapid degradation and decimation of the resource in much of the country. Bamboo resources plummeted so alarmingly that at present the resource is limited to few pockets in the country. Two-thirds of the bamboo in the country is restricted to the North-Eastern Region (NER) while the remaining one-third is spread across the country.
But there is hope for the resurgence of bamboo, and this is based on evidence of significant new and contemporary economic opportunities that have emerged over the past decades. A bamboo revolution that holds the potential of reversing economic downturns and ensuring profitability, is very much possible. Bamboo is an untapped avenue of economic growth, and a burgeoning bamboo sector can rope in prosperity, profits, and sustainable livelihoods.
Despite the severe degradation of the resource in the past, India still has a considerable growing stock of bamboo, and comparative annual harvest figures[1] still place India at the top of the global league. It is important to realize the considerable latent potential that bamboo has to contribute to economic growth, poverty alleviation, generating employment, rehabilitating vast tracts of degraded land generated due to past agricultural and industrial practices and policies, and revitalizing the social, economic and ecological well-being of rural economies.
In line with this, goals should be aimed at focusing on recovering the resources lost to the rural poor as it has been a natural capital that has helped them to keep their economies afloat even in times of significant cash crunches. Attempts should be made to replenish bamboo stocks, make it economically beneficial to rural communities in a way that it provides them opportunities to earn a sustainable income and improve their standard of living. Efforts should also be made to increase the economic opportunity from the use of bamboo as an industrial raw material, to raise employment opportunities (especially for the educated and unemployed rural youth), and to rehabilitate the degraded lands across the country (making available and productive a natural resource which is increasingly becoming scarce and expensive).
Over the years a variety of strategies have been developed to reduce the poverty of rural and rurban population through small enterprise development, based on various forest produce. In rural areas, the poor are overwhelmingly dependent on natural resources and in most cases, it is the only capital they possess. They have little power or ability to climb out of poverty. They are not only financially poor, but also opportunity-and knowledge-poor. In this respect, bamboo is one of the few natural resources that could provide a lifeline to sagging rural economies and help integrate them into the market economy. As bamboo is not one commodity but the fountainhead of many products, it could open up a number of markets simultaneously for the rural poor with the added advantage of being a low-risk option.
The bamboo sector also forges personal links with the rural community, allowing them to participate closely in production processes and directly access profits through value addition as compared to other industrialized processes. As the sector is dependent to a large extent on manual labour, it demands many hands to contribute to the cultivation, harvesting, preservation and value-added manufacturing processes. The upshot is that it provides livelihood options in varying activities to a large number of rural workers. This is the main reason why developing countries find it more viable to be involved with the sector whereas developed countries prefer becoming consumptive markets for these very products. Women in particular stand to gain from this sector as they secure means of livelihood due to their dexterity with the material and their ability to shape it into products and more important, they gain from the flexible work hours this sector affords. Bamboo can thus break marginalization through empowerment and also bridge gender divides.
Employment generation and livelihood creation are enabled through strong backward integration of bamboo production and processing. Though tree-like in stature, bamboo is best grown and managed like an agricultural crop or managed as such within the forest. This needs labour input, which calls for significant people involvement. Again, volume production in bamboo is achieved through a large number of unit poles, unlike timber where one large log provides a substantial quantity of wood. But on the other hand, the lightweight poles enable people participation in its transport. Furthermore, the easy linear splitting ability of bamboo, quite unlike that of wood, enables primary processing for a final industrial product to be undertaken by the rural community. The above properties lay the economic basis for definite win-win community-industry partnerships in bamboo, with the bamboo being managed or grown, and primary processing undertaken by communities in rural areas.
Experience has shown natural resources can be harvested sustainably if people stand to benefit from it. The development of bamboo as a cash crop will result in the conservation and protection of the existing resource, and the scaling up of cultivation, which would be a natural outcome of the increased cash value of the resource, as against its present low cash to mere-subsistence value. The environmental benefits from the economic development of bamboo can be very significant.
As a resource that can be harvested annually, it could provide a regular supply of construction material to the communities. If the use of wood could be replaced with that of bamboo, it could reverse the process of severe and rapid degradation of forests and forest cover. Bamboo also helps protect soil from erosion, especially in the upland areas. Bamboo should also be strategically grown to reduce or prevent soil cutting from riverbanks, which is perhaps the major cause of siltation of riverbanks, resulting in reduced carrying capacity of rivers and flooding during the peak rainy season.
In last 3-4 decades, intensifying patterns of land and resource utilization, primarily due to pressure from the rapidly increasing population, have caused land and natural resource degradation in many parts of India. Bamboo is an ideal resource for rehabilitation, even in extremely degraded situations such as land used for brick making.
India with its rich potential of bamboo resources has only just started to develop bamboo marketing and trade. However, the significant bamboo resources in India make it ideally placed to benefit from the experience of China and other countries around the globe. Bamboo holds within it the promise of bailing people out from below poverty line levels.
Bamboo finds many uses today in addition to its conventional uses for handicrafts, scaffolding and the paper industry. It can be used as construction material, as a wood substitute and as food, fuel and a filtration medium. Its real contribution to housing lies in the dual role it can play – of providing a cheap and affordable wood alternative to the homeless while at the same time generating livelihood options for those involved with it.
Bamboo can propel economic growth through increased local production and the sale of high-value wood-substitute products, especially in bamboo-rich states. Robust local production of a local natural resource capital like bamboo will lead to the retention and circulation of cash within the state economies itself, rather than the cash flowing out for purchase of goods from outside the state. Export of cash value-added bamboo products to markets outside the bamboo states could enable incremental cash earnings that will add to the economic growth of the state. Asset creation and local consumption can get a fillip from the increased circulation of money within the state economy from local consumption of locally manufactured products. This consumption will be enabled not only by government purchases, but also as a result of the higher disposable incomes that will be generated.
In India, as elsewhere in other developing countries, strong correlative linkages exist between economic growth, rural poverty and the environment. Firstly, the poor are more vulnerable to the health effects of pollution because of their inadequate nutrition, poor access to health care and their unhealthy living environment. Secondly, the poor are affected faster by degradation of natural resources because of their greater reliance on them to meet basic needs. Environmental degradation, in turn, adversely affects the economy’s capacity to grow, because growth relies on the sustainable productivity of natural resources and the health of the population.
It is a vicious circle, which can be broken through a growth solution that is not only income generating for rural communities but also environmentally sound. Bamboo, a natural resource and one that protects the environment, enables the development of industries, which function through a symbiotic linkage between small and large enterprise that significantly benefits the community.
Bamboo is available throughout the country barring the states of Jammu and Kashmir and Rajasthan (except for some areas). Existing traditional bamboo and cane handicraft products, though not many, could be improved, diversified, produced along industrial assembly lines and converted into value-added products that are already a part of mainstream industry. Value additions could be made to its use in the paper industry and its use in the unorganized scaffolding industry can be doubled. Simultaneously, other mainstream micro and small enterprise products such as matchsticks, pencils, toothpicks, skewer sticks, and blinds, as well as medium-scale industrial panel products that rival wood products, with strong backward community linkages and benefits can be explored. An increase in bamboo products and market opportunities will also result in increases in demand for raw bamboo, besides the production of fresh bamboo shoots and their processed products. There is considerable potential to set up medium and large-scale industries for generating value-added food and wood-substitute products for export markets.
The value-added bamboo industry is ideally placed to adopt that model. Given the right policy atmosphere and thrust, the value-added bamboo industry in India has the potential of reaching a size of USD 2.3 billion (USD 131.5 billion globally) in the next 10 years with a CAGR of 10.3%, employing 11-15 million people in the primary, secondary and tertiary sectors[2].
The bamboo industry also fulfils the criteria needed by sectors that aim to achieve double-digit economic growth. Bamboo has a very strong and direct with rural communities, which would allow them to partake directly and in a more significant way to value addition as compared to other industrialized processes. The value-added bamboo industry thus provides an integrated solution that uses an abundant natural resource that protects the environment and can be processed and generated through community-owned enterprises, both small and large.
Disclaimer: The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not purport to reflect the views or opinions of any organization, foundation, CSR, non-profit or others
Genre: Romance | Year: 2000 | Duration: 100 mins | Director: Sally Potter | Medium: DVD | Trailer: HERE | Language: English, French, Yiddish | My rating: 3.5*/5*
Favorite Dialogue: “Lola: One should never look back. One should never regret. Never.”
This romantic movie by Sally Potter has no chemistry between its co-stars, Johnny Depp and Christina Ricci, even though I quite liked their individual performances as Fegele, a Russian Jew with elfin features separated from her father as a child in 1927 and later re-named as Suzie when she escapes to England, and Cesar, a Romani gypsy with brooding countenance . And therefore there was no heat and the romance seemed sterile.
Fegele’s father leaves for the promise of wealth and better future to the land of opportunity, America, intending to bring his daughter over later. However, after he left, a band of raiders attacks Fegele’s settlement, and she is bundled off in the middle of the night by her grandmother with few gold coins to take the ship to America. She ends up living in a foster home in England. After ten years she leaves England and joins a musical troupe in Paris, with the goal of making enough money so she can go to America to locate her father. She keeps her identity as a Jew a secret – only her roommate, Lola (Cate Blanchett), her roommate’s famous opera-singing lover, Dante (John Turturro), and her landlady know the truth. With World War II looming, Suzie and Lola escapes Paris, and after some drama Suzie reaches America and finds her ailing father in Hollywood.
This beautifully recorded and scored film of love, loss and human character is worth a watch.
Manu Mayank 