Don’t ter-rier self up."Sylvia" has often been knocked as a slight play, one that China Halal certificated empty gelatin capsule shell relies on a single gag..)For all the doggie brilliance, there’s a fourth member of the cast — a rubber-faced Robert Sella — who is of a different breed, entirely. With the kids gone, Greg needs to be needed again." You might call him a little melan-collie. He starts to truly adore his doggie.Man’s best friend may never have a better tail than A.The fact that Sylvia is an attractive young woman under all that puppy love means the audience may ‘paws’ to wonder exactly what’s going on with this canine-human bond.He plays three roles, including a dog-lover with a pooch named Bowser, a haughty Manhattan matron who Sylvia turns into a muttering mess, and a marriage counselor of indeterminate gender.

Daniel Sullivan directs with howling success. Relax. She is a projection, after all, of their fears and fantasies. But with this cast and David Rockwell’s fine sets, it’s a welcome treat. Now, as im-paw-sible as it seems, Broderick is playing Ashford’s master.Ashford, dressed in jean shorts, kneepads, feathered hair, a fuzzy sweater and fur-lined sneakers and bracelets, captures the playful, naughty essence of a dog without being led a-stray by camp. She’s off and running.R. ("You take me back in some basic way," he tells Sylvia. "

All you are is a male menopausal moment," the wife snaps at Sylvia. He’s a restless empty-nester, somewhere "between the first hint of retirement and the first whiff of the nursing home. He is hysterical.Ashford is stepping into the paw tracks of a character previously played in New York in 1995 by Sarah Jessica Parker, who was dating future husband Broderick at the time. You might even call it fetching. Gurney’s charming play, which opened Tuesday at the Cort Theatre.She sniffs around, loves walks in the park and makes her leg twitch when her ears are rubbed. It helps when you have a hot dog in the title role and Annaleigh Ashford, a new Tony Award winner, is at the top of her co-me-tick game. Sylvia interacts with her new owners in English but sometimes gets a little confused. She also runs through the theater’s aisles and tells off a cat in one of the more memorable scenes.

Hide Comments | Add Comment

Proof adds little to the veracity of the story. Do we think of Babri as folk legend or history Do we say, "Once there was a temple and a mosque " or do we say, "On so and so date, a structure was built" History demands specific dates.K. Advani or Uma Bharti scream with victory, one realises that such a view of politics has burnt deep into our psyche.Babri Masjid is today a photo-montage of images, with each image capturing one angle of a strange and kaleidoscopic event. Healing demands that both sides recover from the travails of history. Place evokes meaning, empty capsules market emotion; space can be mapped differently. Healing is not a zero-sum game.Let us not deny there are wounds and that the wounds were salted by politicians. Babri thus gives us three options — create fences between religions by dividing the space; create priority or precedence between structures so that one dominates or displaces the other; or do what sociologist Richard Sennett called "the uses of disorder". The minute we talk of priority, precedence and proof, we go beyond belief to talk about belief.Let us begin at the level of the locality.

Instead of adjustment and syncretism, which seek solutions that demand demolishing a mosque. I remember when Babri happened, a student at an IIT-Delhi meeting screamed, "At last 500 years of Mughal rule has ended. The day Babri became either/or, we lost a bit of tradition, damaged a part of our memory. Babri is a space for living with differences, and making sense of them. History pins you like a butterfly in terms of proof.The scrapbook of photographs reveals the picture of kar sevaks standing on the site as if a battle had been won. Indian civilisation allowed for plurality. One then talks of priority and precedence. Babri is also a failure of storytelling because each separate story demands a different sense of ending, and a different idea of consequences. It is a kaleidoscope which cannot be treated as a lens. What we need is patience, the ability to listen, the art of living with ambiguity, the tradition of Indian syncretism, which does not deny that conflict might offer a better compost heap for democratic solutions than experts’ views of history, architecture and society. But myth and folklore are easy.Babri is not a story of a temple and a mosque, of which came first, of whether Ram was a historical character. Healing, as a wise man said, demands a mutuality of memory of shared legends and folk tales. It does not allow a society to heal or, worse, find its own ways of healing. Sennett argued that confusion, chaos and debate can actually add to the richness of order. There is a difference between truth and facts. A story is what you lived out, told, enacted, but history was external; it existed outside you and coerced you. Healing is a conversation, not a talking past each other.. However, nation states need boundaries, territory, fences, history, but civilisations can do with other less constraining narratives.

It is a choice of frames; it is a choice of pluralism, of space versus place.Babri is not just about belief and faith.Just think of the narrative. A civilisation is a more complex entity. Space is secular, often empty of memory." Oddly, history itself acquires a vindictive quality, a pseudo-mythical power to it. Localities can accommodate contradictions, use the sociological to trump the logical and exclusive. History demands victors and that is the sadness of history. Temple and mosque can easily coexist, not just as structures but as part of the syncretism called India. Babri is cognitive space for handling different beliefs, differing stories. I feel the local cannot be reconstructed through majoritarian histories of the nation state and electoralism. Flip the page and we see Uma Bharti gloating over the victory. Shift to a newspaper and one reads that Prime Minister Narasimha Rao watched quietly as Babri happened.Babri is a wound that won’t heal if Babri is constructed as history and proof, because it is then contested as law, possession, property and fact. Babri Masjid cannot deal only with feelings, communities and differences.

Facts have a cold existence. Babri gets enacted at Charminar in Hyderabad. Babri is about a commons of pain and the faith of two communities, communities which have hurt each other and grown together.The writer is a social science nomad. A truth is a warm shell you live inside. The question we should ask is whether Babri is place or space, myth or history, property or commons. The real choice is elsewhere. Healing leads to a belief that recognises other beliefs and other forms of storytelling. Healing is therapeutic; it needs a different form of storytelling. The idea of Babri as truth and Babri as fact leads to different consequences. We summon the archaeological survey and the department of history to play "proof". When one watched L. Does the problem of Babri exist at the local level How has the society lived so amicably with controversy The question is important for if a locality is at home with the controversy and sees difference as something liveable then whose Babri are we talking about Is Babri then a projection beyond locality Is it a Rorschach, a psychological projection of fears and fantasies, of a wider image of politics being forced on a locality The question one is asking is whether a civilisation looks differently at Babri from the nation state. Demolishment turns a wound into a scar, a stigma.", could be empirical, wishful, accurate and fantastic. In a fable the beginning "once there was. Next to the mosque is posited a temple. Folklore and memory can be better sources for solving Babri than the conflict resolution of social scientists.. Babri then gets enacted and repeated elsewhere.

Hide Comments | Add Comment

Incidentally, those who visit should also pick up the khadi marigold to wear anytime through the commemoration year — made in memory of the martyrs of Jallianwala Bagh and to honour Mahatma Gandhi whose 150th birth anniversary it is this year. A capsule exhibition on this has also opened at the Birmingham Library.

This was followed by a panel discussion on it moderated by Lord Meghnad Desai in which the discussants included Esme Ward, the director of the Manchester Museum and Satnam Sanghera, a well-known journalist who has made a film for Channel 4 on Jallianwala Bagh which was shown on the anniversary date. But then on Wednesday, in the midst of all her Brexit troubles, Theresa May made a statement just before Prime Minister’s Questions about the UK’s "deep regret" over the massacre. Shabana Azmi, his daughter, has been working hard on his commemoration — with books, events and now this very moving film. (And incidentally I was also interviewed for the film).The previous day, a much larger version of the exhibition had opened at the Manchester Museum also in collaboration with the Partition Museum, Amritsar. Over 400 people attended and the exhibition was well covered by the Indian and the British media.The rest of the week has been occupied by Jallianwala Bagh commemorations, and we are really satisfied that all the lobbying and pushing for recognition for this day, despite the preoccupation of the two governments in the UK and in India, has worked. The large audience was full of Urdu afficionados and film buffs. The week began with the premiere of the biopic/documentary Kaifinama on the poet and lyricist Kaifi Azmi at the Asian Film Festival. This was an example of communal living, under the strict rules of the Communist Party — so that all the residents shared what they had — with limited money and limited space.This was a week of commemorations.

On Pharmaceutical hard gelatin empty capsule Friday, the Indian high commissioner, Ruchi Ghanashyam, opened an exhibition, Punjab Under Siege: Jallianwala Bagh, 1919 (put together by the Partition Museum, Amritsar and the Manchester Museum) at the Nehru Centre, London. It is a special film for me too as it contains excerpts from a documentary I had shot on Shabana at least two decades ago. This is an exhibition which has been curated in India and then worked upon by the team at the Manchester Museum — who have supported the project wholeheartedly. Do you think we will ever Brexit? The jury is out on that…. But Shabana remembered it as being a very happy space where children grew up securely — in and out of homes where they were welcome. While many were disappointed that she did not give a full, wholehearted apology — the signs were apparent that this was not going to happen. It was like a jugalbandi with Shabana reciting the original Urdu poem and Sudeep reading his English version. We also saw the same poems feature in the film, so it was poignant. For it has been often discussed that an "apology" would carry financial implications or payouts. So this footage was some of the last remaining memories of that time — as Shabana walked us through "Red Hall". For me this entire reluctance by the British government seems a little strange: none of the descendants of the massacre’s victims that I spoke to during my research on my book on the massacre ever said they awaited any financial benefits from the apology.

The event was held at Bafta, where filmmaker Sangeeta Dutta conducted a dialogue between Shabana and Sudeep Sen, a poet himself, who has translated Kaifi’s poems into English.Bob Blackman, an MP with a large number of Indians in his constituency, introduced the topic, expressing his own sorrow over what happened a century back and many MPs took part. They are expecting large crowds through the year — especially since this is a story of undivided Punjab — and both Indians and Pakistanis are likely to visit since Manchester is neutral territory.And by the way — Britain is slowly learning about the pains of Partition. Poets like Ali Sardar Jafri also lived there — but unfortunately now, like so much else of our heritage it has been erased from memory and that building has been pulled down. This was used in the film specially as it depicted a building in which Kaifi and other progressive poets lived together in Mumbai. India is in the midst of elections and the UK is in the midst of Brexit — but the event was not forgotten. But while Britain missed an opportunity to prove significantly that it was no longer the same racist regime it was in 1919 — it was reassuring to see that they were, in other ways, trying to make a special effort to remember those who were martyred in 1919.Last Tuesday there was a debate in the Westminster Hall — a forum for MPs to have open-ended debates away from the main chamber. But this debate obviously does not have the same meaning and importance than if the debate were held within the House of Commons main chambers. There was a helpful statement by Mark Field, a junior minister in the FCO about the UK’s awareness of the horrific event.

Hide Comments | Add Comment