CBSE, let students stay innocent, please
Admitted, we live in a violent world. People get killed in road rage, bar room brawls, over failed love affairs, dowry demands, by drunk drivers and what not. Terrorists cause bomb blasts; spurned lovers throw acid on girlfriends; parents kill children for disobedience, children kill parents for property; and the elderly are found with their throats slit. The media keep reminding us that blood and gore are the merciless reality of our everyday existence.
Every act of violence conjures gory mental images. The images have the potential to create distorted personalities if they stay engraved in individual memory for long. That’s the reason why the society at large is always wary of pictures of violence. If children are asked not watch violent movies and the media avoids displaying graphic images of violent acts, there’s a reason to it. That could be termed escaping the reality but it serves a purpose.
That is what makes the CBSE question, which asks students to report on a bomb blast scene, so unacceptable. It forces students to recreate violent images they should close their eyes to. For those who have first hand experience of bomb blasts, recreating the scene could be traumatic. For those who have been reconstructing the scene with vague second hand information and from television grabs, the exercise could be difficult too.
River City’s Libby on 10yrs of show
â??The detail involved is incredible; from the streets to the buildings and even
in the sets.
â??Itâ??s one of the most inspiring places to work that Iâ??ve ever had.
â??The first time we saw it we were handed polystyrene cups with champagne in
them. We just stood there and stared â?? it was quite surreal.â?
Mother to Joanne and Ruth Rossi, Libbyâ??s character Gina runs the Oyster CafÃ
in the fictional Glasgow suburb.
And Gina has had no shortage of drama in her life on screen.Libby said: â??The
drama includes all the jeopardy life presents, our hopes, fears, loves and
dreams.
â??Iâ??ve loved the storylines, in terms of the different love affairs Ginaâ??s had.
â??Gina has terrible taste in men and wears her heart on her sleeve.â?
Libby believes after almost a decade River City â?? which attracts up to 500,000
viewers a week â?? has cemented its place in Scottish culture.
She said: â??Itâ??s just become part of our culture and you expect it to be
mentioned when you go to a panto now. Itâ??s a reference point in Scottish
culture.
â??One of the things that people really love about the show is that it
represents a city with an incredible amount of passion and a great sense of
pride in it.
â??Its relationships are very strong and hospitality is a big part of that.
â??Itâ??s just a massive influence, as thereâ??s an expectation of being there to
help and being encouraged.
â??Thereâ??s an evolution of community here â?? a Celtic thing â?? that makes River
City work because people can identify with that sense of community.
â??Thatâ??s why you can tell a River City story and get away with it, without
ambulances and police cars.
â??It represents a city like Glasgow thatâ??s already in place.â?
scotsfeatures@the-sun.co.uk
Neil’s new love
Neil Nitin Mukesh has been very cagey about his love affairs so far. The â??Playersâ?? actor was linked with Asin but neither admitted to the relationship and they never commented on the subsequent break-up too. Now it seems Neil has fallen in love once again and the lucky lady is none other than â??Jannatâ?? actress Sonal Chauhan who he had met ages ago at an event but had lost touch with.
Recently, the duo reconnected at an award function and has been inseparable ever since. Sources say they have been going on romantic late night coffees and dinners. Moreover, she was the only â??newâ?? guest at a bash Neil recently hosted to catch up with old friends. Neil and Sonal also attended Jackky Bhagnaniâ??s sister Honeyâ??s wedding together where they made a lot of heads turn.
Of course, they are not telling all yet but the black berry posts and social network pictures of them put up by Neil are a dead giveaway. Apparently, he has admitted to some friends that Sonal is the â??special woman in his life right nowâ?¦â? Sonal too, has been confiding to gal pals on BBM about her feelings for him.
Hopefully, the stars will admit to their relationship soon and not hide behind the â??good friendsâ?? clichÃ!
Indonesian women get husbands’ pay to stop affairs
Indonesian women get husbands? pay to stop affairs
GORONTALO: Thousands of male Indonesian civil servants had their monthly pay transferred to their wives? bank accounts this week in a bid by a local government to stop men having affairs.
The Gorontalo administration on northern Sulawesi island issued the recommendation early this year to its 3,200 civil servants, saying it would help control funds usually spent on mistresses.
?Men are usually unable to control their behaviour if they have too much money in their pocket,? government spokesman Rifly Katili told AFP.
?I?m pretty sure this will eliminate the possibility of love affairs that undermine families.?
About 90 percent of the workers are voluntarily taking part in the initiative, Katili said. ?This kind of initiative will also empower the employees? wives to learn about household budget management,? he said. Katili said many wives had complained to the governor that their husbands withheld how much they earned, typically between one and four million rupiah ($110-$440) a month. Katili did not know how many civil servants had cheated on their wives. ?Unfortunately, we never researched that.? afp
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Do morals matter? The DSK affair and France
The French don’t do sex well. Political sex scandals that is.
But a sea change does appear in the offing for French journalism that may change all that. The widely known, but only lately reported, personal misconduct of Socialist politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn (DSK) appears to have provoked a fit of conscience.
This has not always been so. When the President of the International Monetary Fund was arrested in New York last May, the French philosophes went bananas.
Writing in Le Monde, Pascal Bruckner said:
America obviously has a problem with sex that stems from its protestant heritage. â?¦ Itâ??s not enough though to describe the country as puritanical because what governs here is a twisted puritanism which, after the sexual revolution, talks the language of free love and coexists with a flourishing porn industry. What we have here is lubricious Puritanism.
LibÃration sounded the same theme, though in a muted key. It complained the DSK affair had produced France’s
first â??Anglo-Saxonâ? sex scandal and brutally forced France to enter a zone of public debate which, until now, because of cultural exception, â??Latinâ? identity or democratic weakness, was hitherto confined to rumors and gossip amongst a select circle of insiders.
Times have changed. Disdain for Anglo-Saxon ethical standards has moved on to an examination of French media morals. But the question of what will inform these morals does not appear to have been asked.
Transparency, how far? (La transparence, jusqu’où?) is the headline on the front page of the 28 February 2012 issue of LibÃration. An editorial and a report on the publication of the book Sexe, Mensonges et MÃdias (Sex, Lies and Media) by Jean Quatremer, the newspaper’s Brussels correspondent, follow on pages 2 and 3.
The article Sexe et politique: la presse sur le divan (Sex and politics: the press on the couch) recounts the press’s failure to investigate the private lives of the powerful — from François Mitterrand’s prostate cancer and second family to the antics of DSK.
LibÃration reports that its reporter
had been one of the few who dared to say publicly that DSK had a problem with women. His appointment to the closed world of Washington had been a high risk and had been a perfect illustration of the press’s bad habits. The lies, the refusal to investigate the taste for colluding with the powerful.
Following DSK’s appointment to the IMF in 2007 the article stated that Quatremer wrote:
the only real problem with Strauss-Kahn is his relationship to women. Too pressing, he often comes close to harassment. This is known throughout the media, but nobody talks about (we are in France). But the IMF is an international institution where morals are Anglo-Saxon. An inappropriate gesture, an allusion too specific and the press will have a field day.
These words went unnoticed until the front-runner for the French Socialist Party’s candidacy for the 2012 presidential election was arrested in New York and charged with attempted rape.
Nicolas Demorand, the editor of LibÃration wrote that in the wake of the DSK affair a journalist must examine his conscience and ask
if he has done his job properly or, for reasons good or ill, totally missed a subject who obviously deserved scrutiny? Who has not thought about the uncertain border between privacy and a potential political problem, about whether he must inform his readers?
The French press is entering a post-DSK era, Demorand said,
Our media’s all too timid modus operandi can now be seen with a new eye. It is true that journalists are friends with politicians. ‘Stay away from power!’ is the primary principal, an American journalist used to say. In France, we have dinner together, we go on holidays together, we have love affairs, we are graduates of the same schools, and so on. There is no tradition of investigation into the private world of politics. .. The public consequences of the president’s private life have remained in the shadows. This is because of a preference for commentary over cold facts. And also because of the lack of independence of public television stations. Let us point out that the President of the Republic appoints the station’s heads and chooses with his royal hand the journalists who will be allowed the privilege of interviewing the monarch.
France must find new ways of reporting on the powerful, the editorial concluded.
Not by moralizing or by voyeurism, but simply informing its readers when it is appropriate to do so. Investigate each story case by case and bear the burden of publishing. In short: become a working journalist.
All in all this is great stuff. LibÃration — a center left newspaper founded in 1972 under the aegis of Jean Paul Sartre — is seeking a revolution in the standards of French journalism. I hope it succeeds.
But in reading these reports, I was struck by a ghost, obliquely identified by LibÃration as an American ethic where morals are Anglo-Saxon. The tone of these stories is that virtue, at least as it is understood in the Anglosphere, is too religious too foreign for France. The French press’s failure to challenge the powerful was a failure of utility, not of virtue.
The religious, or moral element, is not completely absent. The French Catholic daily La Croix has argued the DSK affair poses the question of the quest for coherence between public and private life, and virtue, a word that has gone out of fashion, could become the new prerequisite for political life. Yet few other newspapers have pressed the issue.
La Croix has called for the return of morality to civil life — a virtue formed by a Catholic sensibilities of goodness and truth. This call should also be sounded to the press in France.
But I would hope that morals  as understood in the Anglo-sphere, not the dreaded moralizing condemned by LibÃration,  be brought to the table as well, for they inform our (English language) understanding of the truths of journalism.
In a 1943 study of the English novelist, EM Forester, Lionel Trilling coined the phrase moral realism. Trilling sought to overcome the Marxist binary view of the world in literary criticism, to overcome the old intellectual game of antagonistic principles.
Moral Realism [was] not the awareness of morality itself but of the contradictions, paradoxes and dangers of living the moral life. Â .. [not simply the knowledge of] good and evil but the knowledge of good-and-evil.
This ethic applies to reporting as well. The absence of reporting on the sin and human failings of political leaders should not be replaced with a 24/7 inspection of their private lives. Rather a sensibility that paradox, complexity and ambiguity are part of the human condition.
Is this too much to expect? Is it possible to use nuance in an age whose critical faculties have been dulled by reality TV and people who are famous for being famous? Where should the line between public and private be drawn?
Whitney Houston’s Stunning Secrets And 3 Lesbian Affairs (Photo)
The March 12 Issue of Globe Magazine features Whitney Houstons stunning secrets exposed including her 3 lesbian affairs which were kept quiet until now. According to the Globe Whitney engaged in 3 torrid lesbian love affairs but they do not yet reveal with whom. Could this be true? Whitney always seemed partial to men but we will find out when the Globes print edition comes out on Friday. The Globe is not going to let Whitney rest in peace as they take full advantage of her tragic death to sell more magazines the irony here is that one of the deadly secrets they claim to reveal relates to fears that grave robbers are after the $500,000 worth of jewellery and designer clothes buried with the star. Of course it is Globe Mag who are behaving like grave robbers .
What other awful secrets are revealed? Well there are the predictable insinuations about how Whitney really felt about Kevin Costner who starred with her in The Bodyguard. Did Whitney have a crush on Kevin? Again the details will be revealed in the print edition which we will of course report on Friday.
RELATED: Final Photo Of Whitney Houston In Her Open Coffin Uncensored Photo
The ugliest revelation that Globe Mag claims to expose is that Whitney hated her mom, Emily Cissy Houston. Well of all the secrets that Globe claims to know, this one seems entirely plausible. Obviously Whitney was an extremely troubled and unhappy soul and that usually implies a difficult relationship with one or both parents. In fact there are credible sources that claim Whitneys death in the bathtub on February 12 was a suicide. Whitneys dad, John Russell Houston, Jr., dies in 2003 and so its hard to nail him for much now.
Globe claims: In a bombshell exclusive, GLOBE reveals for the first time the stunning secrets Whitney Houston took to her grave including her hatred for her mom and how she really felt about her Bodyguard co-star Kevin Costner. Also, read about fears that grave robbers will dig up her body to steal the $500,000 in jewels buried with her all in the new GLOBE.
Leave Whitney alone. Her life obviously gave her little happiness since she was always trying to drug and drink herself into oblivion. Now the vultures are crowding around to pick her dead and sad bones. And we are reporting it and you are reading it.
Arab Love Affairs: The Best of Middle Eastern Folklore
Passion. Strife. Separation. Tragedy. Just another day in Middle Eastern Romantic folklore. (Image source: fandor.com)
AMY CALDER: Love affairs with film
February 11
AMY CALDER: Love affairs with film
By Amy Calder acalder@mainetoday.com
Staff Writer
Around Valentines Day, you hear all kinds of love stories.
Jerusalem by Simon Sebag Montefiore
Jerusalem The Biography by Simon Sebag Montefiore, Phoenix, pound;9.99
THIS literary epic spans 3,000 years in describing how a small and remote town became the Holy City and the desire of empires.
It is a compelling tale of wars, love affairs, the revelations of kings and saints, conquerors, prophets and whores.
A lively narrative explains why Jerusalem is the capital of two peoples, the shrine of three faiths, the site of Judgement Day and a modern day battlefield in a clash of civilisations.
Affairs of the heart exposed
Six of Sydneys top chefs reveal the ingredient that really lights their fire.
It could be a lifelong passion, a great love, or a fresh obsession with something new and exciting. Sometimes its the one thing they just cant live without. Good Living asks six chefs about their love affairs with their favourite ingredients, why they adore them and how they use them.
KYLIE KWONG
I am currently obsessed, the always-passionate Kylie Kwong says, with organic old man saltbush leaves.
