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NEW YORK: Last week on March 2 , ordinary Brazilians have been jubilant at the news that I’m Still Here pocketed an Oscar — the first ever Brazilian film to do so. Walter Salles’s work, which stars Fernanda Torres and Selton Mello, is a powerful exposition of the human cost paid by those who opposed Brazil’s military dictatorship, with its focus on the family of Rubens Paiva, an opponent of the junta who was tortured and murdered in 1971. I’m Still Here does not focus too deeply into the background of Paiva, a sometime social democratic politician who had lived in Yugoslavia and Paris following the dictatorship’s 1964 seizure of power but returned home to continue family life. It is, ostensibly, a story about the Paivas’ experience of state persecution and their fight for justice — particularly that of Rubens’s wife Eunice, who died at the age of eighty-nine in 2018.

Nobody can claim that the rate of growth of agricultural production, especially of foodgrain, has been higher in the neoliberal period than during the years of dirigiste development that preceded it. It may have been somewhat lower but let us agree that it was certainly not higher. On the other hand, the rate of growth of Gross Domestic Product was estimated to be significantly higher and several economists argued that this growth rate was exaggerated. Then again, let us agree that taking the period as a whole it has been noticeably higher.

NEW YORK: In 1960, a young Robert Zimmerman — who had begun to call himself “Bob Dylan” — journeyed from the icy flatlands of Minnesota to New Jersey on a pilgrimage. His destination: the bedside of his ailing idol, the legendary folk hero, Woody Guthrie. He was obsessed with Woody, or rather, with the mythic figure Guthrie created in his memoir, Bound for Glory. The book painted Guthrie as a train-hopping folk troubadour singing for hobo camps, union halls, and saloons, armed with nothing but a guitar and harmonica. Biographer Clinton Heylin described Dylan at this time as being fully immersed in his “Guthrie phase.”

LONDON: Michael Burawoy had three lifelong passions. The first was English football, specifically Manchester United, the team he supported from childhood and to which he remained loyal for the rest of his life. The other two were Marxism and sociology, into which he poured his prodigious energies for over half a century. I don’t know anything about football, but I was privileged to have firsthand exposure to Michael’s other two obsessions over five decades.

V.S. Naipaul once said that ancestral memories are like "trap doors to a bottomless past". This was my first thought when I heard about the death of HH Prince Karim Aga Khan, the 49th Imam Zaman of Islam's Ismaili sect and unquestionably the world leader who has inspired me most in my lifetime. I am not an Ismaili. In fact, my direct ancestor, the Mukhi of Calcutta Jamat in 1837, led a tax revolt/property dispute against the 1st Aga Khan when Lord Auckland invited him to flee Qajar Persia for the protection of the British Crown. We are known as Sunni Ismailis but the Khoja Sunnat Jamat is miniscule while the Ismaili Imamate runs history's biggest development network across Africa, the Arab world, South Asia and the ancient Ismaili enclaves in Tajikistan, Hunza and Afghanistan.

NEW YORK: It is fitting, for a variety of reasons, in these current political times that we have a new film instalment of a superhero with a long history of fighting against fascism and Nazis. While Sam Wilson has had the Captain America mantle for some time now—with a Disney+ streaming series—this will be the world’s first chance to see him in a solo movie on the big screen. The result is an action-packed journey with plenty of political espionage that lays an excellent foundation for higher-stakes stories in the future. The film isn’t a masterpiece, but doesn’t need to be. It introduces the world to Wilson’s Captain America in a grounded and relevant way while providing plenty of excitement and teasing of what’s to come.

NEW YORK: Losing the powerful film director David Lynch is so awful that it is hard to know what to say and how best to say it. Though he’d stepped away from feature film directing after Inland Empire (2006) and left as his long-form swan song the stunning return of the television show Twin Peaks (2017), as long as he lived there was always hope for one final Lynch movie. And just knowing he was there — alive and odd and chipper and liable to release at any moment some mad short film or weather report or cartoon featuring The Angriest Dog in the World — was cheering. If there was room in the world for David Lynch to be successful and widely admired, maybe there’d be room in the world for your peculiar self as well?

Ever since she faced the movie cameras in a tomboy's role in Satyajit Ray's Teen Kanya, in 1961, AparnaSen has been a head turner. Her unconventional beauty was heightened by her sex appeal through which her little grey cells brightly shone.

Liberal opinion is invariably opposed to “nationalism”. It treats “nationalism” as a homogeneous term that necessarily entails a non-friendly, non-accommodative and rivalrous attitude towards other countries. This view however is completely erroneous; anti-colonial third world nationalism is entirely different from the nationalism that developed in Europe in the seventeenth century following the Westphalian Peace Treaties. This difference appears in the most unmistakeable form in the difference between the nationalism of a Hitler, which is descended from European nationalism, and that of a Ho Chi Minh, which exemplifies anti-colonial nationalism.

If the debut season of the Korean Netflix series Squid Game laid bare the ails of modern capitalism, its highly anticipated second season reflects the challenges to organizing against it.