Bahrain National Museum

Another country, Another museum. So, I am in another country for a first time and like every country I've visited, the first place to go is to the national museum and oddly, it has never disappointed me.

Since I was with a couple of friends, I've to squeeze the visit with a bunch of other places in the country and will write a separate post on that. The idea is to spend a couple of hours in the museum in the afternoon and given that the museum is relatively small, it was enough though.

Bahrain is an interesting country - it just breaks the molds of definition in some ways and for a small country, the place packs a lot of punch in terms of the variety it offers. So when I read a little about the country, I was surprised to see this little island's history stretching back to 4000 years, So, that makes the visit to the museum interesting.

The primary reason the visit fascinated me was the Dilmun mounds and the Dilmun culture. It is a wonder that an island of such small size has been continuously inhabited for the past 4000+ years. The Dilmun culture is contemporary to Indus valley civilization and astonishingly, have traded with the IVC as well. Seeing a Harappan seal in a Bahrain museum is surprise enough, but knowing that the seal was there because it was found as part of a civilization which traded with them.

Seal 8 is IVC

There is a reason these things not just brings the kid inside but also opens one's eyes as to the enormity of life and time itself. We are but a speck in this timeline and it puts a perspective on the fights we do and the silly ways our sense of propriety works - we are but conditioned creatures of our times.








Back to the Dilmun, we drove past the A'ali mounds in the morning and unfortunately, we didn't had the time to stop. So have to do that another time. However, the mounds are recreated in the museum with a lot of detailing on the excavations carried out and the museum also displays a lot of the artifacts from the burial mounds.

The Dilmuns were in Bahrain for about 1500 years and declined as the Sassanians took power in Mesopatomia and though not part of the empire, they had regular communication with the empire and the display of the communications on the Dilmuns gives a rare perspective into life as it existed 2500 years back.

The Greeks refer to the island as Tylos and had a good idea of the geography of the place and its significance in the silk road and the communication with India. That period is when Tylos rises in pearl trade and goes on to play an important role in the area.

As Islam conquered Arabia, it landed in Bahrain as well. The Islamic culture established roots and the next part of the museum (and the history of the island) looks into the influence of Islam in the transformation of the island to what it is today. However, there seems to be a lack of information on what really happened during this period and the colonial influence during the past 200 years and how Bahrain came to become an independant country. For some reason either this is not depicted clearly or I missed some part of the museum.

The other building which was looking gorgeous in the evening sun was hosting an art exhibition, While there are some which I liked, I was tired by this time and was ready to sit and enjoy the sea breeze and the amazing space the museum has created.























Overall, a must-see place in Bahrain whatever the amount of time you have.. still waiting to see the big one in the area..

Nollywood Nights

The advantage of Netflix is the window it opens into a world which we seldom see otherwise. The content is such that you get to open a small window to peek into a part of the world and get fascinated.

Nollywood refers to the movie industry in Nigeria. The part that is fascinating is that they make movies at such small budgets that you get to see some seriously funny bits in Youtube. But all of that changed when I started watching a few movies in Netflix. They give a perspective which is rarely available to be seen. This is about a few movies from Nigeria.

The Wedding Party 1 & 2

This is the best first movie to see if you want to get introduced to Nollywood. I call this the 'Hum Aapke hain kaun' of Africa. It is fun, drama and all mixed together.

The movie starts off slowly and one may be a little confused with the English spoken and the local language mixes, and it is such a cute thing to think at first that everyone is overacting and then realize that that is how acting is defined in Nollywood. Once you pass those self doubts about watching, you are in for a treat.

There is not much of a story - just a Nigerian marriage happening. We get to see the fights between the families, the tribal rivalry, the marriage ceremony itself and a lot of drama before the marriage actually happen at the end.

My favorite scene is when the grooms family comes to get the brides price and the dance both the families does when they enter the hall and many more. The movie just flies through and does not take itself seriously and the actors are all fantastic - the pastor in the marriage is a riot.

This gives an entirely new perspective on the lives and culture of the Nigerians and there is so much color and verve in there which resembles a lot like our culture and it is easy to spot the similarities than identify the differences.

Part 2 of the movie is more of the same. With another marriage in the family with a few additional twists and the family deciding to have the marriage in Dubai, the whole scene has a new life and the same fun and wit that drove the first part is replicated here. If there is mindless entertainment you want, these two are the movies.

Hakkunde

 However, you want to feel good and watch a meaningful movie - 'Hakkunde' is the one to watch.

It is a simple movie with no pretenses. Unlike the 'Wedding party' movies, Hakkunde tells the story of an ordinary Nigerian - not very handsome, just the ordinary bloke trying to make his way in the world and it weaves so many stories around it to make the whole thing interesting.

Akkunde is a young unemployed man in Lagos living on the handouts from his sister. He feels ashamed of it but tries hard to find a job. When circumstances force him to take help from a bike rider, he hears about a government loan for rearing cattle in rural areas and decides to get the money by moving to an interior village.

The bad luck chases him - the government stops the program to give out loan and he is not sure about going back to Lagos - so he decides to take a temp teaching job in the local school and goes through some challenges to get the kids to attend.

He also meets the village witch - Aisha - called so because her two husbands died with similar symptoms, So he falls in love with her and tries to fight the superstition with the village elders and meanwhile find a way to use the cattle shit as manure and start selling it to farmers.

What is fascinating about Hakkunde is the little nugget of Nigerian life it shows. Life is hard but people live through it without complaining and try to make the most out of it. Though he becomes friends with the village elder's daughter, he falls in love with the two-times widow and try to bring some awareness about the superstitions. I watched it more fascinated but also got a educated a little about the real problems in countries like Nigeria which are not that different from what goes on here.

I have a few more movies in my queue and in between got fascinated by the fantastic Turkish series 'Ottomon' and will get back to Nigeria in a while. 

1917 (2019) & Little Women (2019)

This year so far is a good one for movies. There are so many that seem to be making the cut and take the experience of cinema to a new level. So, here are my thoughts on the two I've watched in the last 2 weeks.

1917

Sam Mendes takes 'Saving Private Ryan' and does a re-take on it with a slight reversal in the story. While the movie does remind one of Spielberg's classics, it takes a different route to the hell - otherwise called war.

The movie opens with a couple of soldiers lying on the grass one smoking and the other napping - in what seem to be a serene environment - except when their boss comes at them and sends them packing through the 'no man's land' to the front lines of fighting with Germany to deliver an urgent message to stop an attack the next day.

The intensity of their location in time and space is realized the moment they start walking across the trenches - with their one-ways and stretchers laid out with dugouts for the generals - and the random shell that bursts to make life in general a misery are shown in single shot movements - except that it was an cinematic illusion created by the director. The effect of that illusion is that claustrophobic feeling of being in the trench with so many others jostling for space and as a viewer, you feel that jostling in the seat.

To me, '1917' - while as a story was as good as any, the landscape it painted looked a lot like the still-life wonders of the French masters of post-impressionist timeline. The farm house with the cherry trees or the cow shed with a bucket of warm milk or the night view of the city being bombed were just jumping out of paintings. The music reminds one of the pulsing rhythm of Hans Zimmer in 'Dunkirk'.

The entire story flows by very fast and while it can be guessed to a large extent how the whole thing is going to end - the acting by both the leads - Blake with his boyish face and a personal motivation and Schofeld with his cynical view of the things around him - by 1917, the army was bogged down and had more Schofeld-like blokes than Blake.

However, the movie - while having the horror of war as the background feels more like an adventure than a visceral war movie. That horror of war seems to be missing strangely, in what is to be a movie about war. To me the entire movie came down to the moment, Schofeld comes out of the water and hears the Gospel song 'Wayfaring stranger' - that is a moment of silent horror that cannot be replicated by any amount of gore.

 Little Women

 I have never read 'Little Women'. Thats not entirely true - as I've read a very abridged version of the book with illustrations and all - which may not count as reading the book anyway. So, I was interested in watching the movie as it garnered some raving reviews.

The first thing that remains with you when you finish watching the movie is the colors of the picture and the understated beauty of the surroundings - be it New York or Paris or Concord. The movie is like a painting on steroids and I loved the way it was filmed. There is a closeup shot of Jo thinking in the beach with her beautiful tresses of hair slowly moving and her face against the soft, grayish beach sand and the sand sticking to her hair. The shot remains for a short moment and it is etched in your mind forever.

Aside from the superficial beauty, the story of four sisters in search of a marriage with an independent second one despising the same and looking for a career may sound pretty much like a North American version of another famous story by another female writer but the likeness ends with that kind of one liner and it is a little about love and aspirations of Josephine March and her sisters and where in life they ended up at the end of it all.

The story is told in a spate of back and forth in time and so the connections are made with the events and it is a bit like embroidery. The events are matched thematically and the story is told in sort of a non-linear way. It is interesting, annoying and absolutely loving to watch.

Love forms the central theme and the civil war lingers on in the background. While the poor March's father has been fighting in the front, the rich and young Laurie is tom-fooling around in Paris. It is a contrast that comes to the fore again and again with no one talking about it.

Poverty and Love is a disastrous combination. While love sustains poverty, poverty doesn't sustain love. The subtext of Meg's story is the same - she marries a penniless person for love and only Jo's help ensures that she goes into the 'happily ever after' curve. Though Jo never ends up loving anyone - the ending is ambiguous - I believe she realized that the penniless don't love and like Amy says elsewhere - they look at marriage as an economic proposition. While this can be said to be changed in the west, marriage still remains an economic proposition here - for women as well as men.

I liked the movie - as I tend to like any classic adaptation - but the movie raises above the statements we can make and succeeds in telling a beautiful story with emotions that we can connect to.

Creation - Gore Vidal

I read 'Creation' the first time a long time back in a public library in the Poconos. It is where I started reading Vidal as well. 'Burr' got me hooked and 'Creation' along with 'Julian' made sure he remains one of my favorite authors of all time.

Gore Vidal is considered a revisionist historical fiction writer. What it means is that he tries to look at history in a different way than the convention dictates. For example, convention dictates that the Greeks stopped the Persian empire in its tracks. Instead, Vidal says given the Persian empire's size and priorities, the Greeks played only a minor part and it is exaggerated by their written historical evidences. That seems fine to me.

But what is really interesting about 'Creation' is that it is not only history (fictionalized to an extent, of course) but it is also a philosophical treatise on the initial thoughts of many philosophies as it exist today. Vidal chooses a time period in history when a lot many of the great minds the world will produce were all alive - including the Buddha, Gosala, Zoroaster, Lao Tzu, Master Kung (a.k.a Confusius), Mahavira, Socrates - and of course a lot of name-dropping happens with the kings and such as well.

What makes it different - also interesting - is the fact that the story is also a discussion of a lot of life philosophies and we come across the early Aryan religion and the stories - as well as a little snippet of Indian history around the succession of Ajatasatru and all. The fact that none of these seem forced or unbelievable is the thing that is good about the book.

The book is history as perceived by the Persians - as it should be. The Achaemenids (preceded by the Assyrians and followed by the Sassanids) built the largest empire on Earth in their day and held it till the Medieval times. The art they inspired remains an inspiration today and the codification of rights in the Cyrus cylinder still is an inspiration for liberty of the people. They left enormous amounts of written records on their daily transactions and ruins that exist from the Near East till the Indus valley. Their history though is barely told anywhere.

Vidal constructs the story from the eyes of Cyrus Spitama - a fictional grandson of the Prophet Zoroaster - and his life in the Achaemenid court of Darius I and Xerxus the great. He also travels from Greece to Cathay (the Known world in the 4th century BC when the story happens) and encounter the various personalities and discuss philosophy and politics with them. Vidal also provides a perspective on the administration as it existed in the Achaemenid empire - the clay tablets of Persepolis and Babylon must've helped richly - building a picture of life in the Persian empire as close to what we can perceive now with the time lapsed between.

How was the universe created? is the central question of the book. Cyrus Spitama narrates and asks the questions to all the celebrities of his day - he goes out to meet with them and discuss and record - so we hear about the rejection of desire by Buddha, the importance of tradition from Confucius and the philosophies of life from everyone from Anaxogores to Lao Tzu. Cyrus records everything and compares against the tenets of his own religion - Zoroastrianism. Thus we get to learn a bit on everything and seek out any that interests.

The writing is cynical, at times bitter and Cyrus, in his assessment of everyone is harsh. Vidal is merciless in his criticism of religions and is full of witty one liners about them. Here is one I liked.

"Hereditary priests usually tend to atheism. They know too much."

However, the book somehow feels to end suddenly. May be the vast canvas that Vidal takes on becomes a little too much and the intertwining of political and philosophical history must've been tiring as well.

Overall, a very good book with a lot of insights and needs multiple reading to fully grasp and understand everything that is said.