‘Women and Islam’ won the Best Documentary Prize at the Festival ArtDeco de Cinema at Sao Paolo in Brazil. Look at the Festival site, the Award ceremony looks like it must have been a lot of fun. I would have also gotten an excellent audience to talk to about my work and give out promotional gifts, as they call it in the marketing World – stickers!

This award has simply inspired me to think that I have to create more and expand this project of mine. The several short films(Women and Islam is one of them), should be stringed into a feature documentary. So I think that will be next for sure.

I am really glad that the film is challenging the notions of what it means to be a Muslim woman in today’s society. Islam and it’s role and preconceptions need to be analyzed and understood in a deeper way. Mainstream media always generalizes complicated matters such as these and the individual testimonies of unique and strong protagonists do not come to the surface in Islam’s contemporary narrative. To add to the heady mix, when you bring in gender then an age old rhetoric concerned with the status of Eastern women and discrimination is heard. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are being waged and perpetuated partially under the guise of liberating Afghani Muslim women – as we see in the video, many Muslin women are perfectly capable of helping themselves!

Winners of the 2011 Festival ArtDeco de Cinema in Brazil

The West should get to witness and meet other women like Sameena who might wear a burkha but are taxi drivers bread earners, mothers, teachers and scholarly daughters and even risk their lives to stand for what they believe. Sameena did not see the burkha as repressive or constraining, but some of us make that assumption.  I am glad that this film is getting the attention it deserves. I hope this fuels a larger dialogue around the world – if this inspires you, get in touch with me and let’s give your take!

When India was attacked on 26th November 2008, news anchors and journalists started calling it ‘India’s 9/11.’ This film examines this terminology and the links between 9/11, 26/11 in Mumbai, Iraq, Afghanistan and Modern terror. The conversations between taxi drivers and their passengers in Mumbai taxis delve into these larger issues. A tragic terrorist attack, a lapse in security, the loss of the top Anti Terrorist Squad officials who were investigating the so called ‘Hindu terrorist’ attacks in Malegao lead the people to voice their notions of larger conspiracy theories at a time when the Mainstream media mentions none of this. These are not authoritative voices but perspectives like yours and mine on the events which affect and shape our lives. They are short takes, 140 characters long tweets in taxis, between real people riding in a taxi, in a city that experienced extreme violence, terror and loss.

The current poll on The Taxi Takes has a majority of 50% who say it should not be termed India’s 9/11 and 34% in favor of the Mumbai attacks being termed ‘India’s 9/11. However there are also a small 8 % who are not sure which hence makes this a rather balanced undecided poll.

Watch the film and cast your vote. But more importantly I urge you to listen to the common voices on the streets of the Mumbai Metropolis and gather a sense of where the Mumbai terrorist attack of might figure in the larger scheme of current happenings in the world. Please give your take and comments below.

Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri, a former Pakistani lawmaker issued an anti terrorism fatwa in London this Tuesday. It stated that suicide bombing was banned by Islam “without any excuses, any pretexts, or exceptions.” This is a great stand and one that many other organizations have taken before. Even recently after the incident at Fort Hood, The National Coalition of South Asian Organizations released ‘their fatwa.’ The NCSO consists of over twenty organizations who had issued this strong statement after the tragedy in Fort Hood. It is not any different from most of the voices I heard in the Mumbai taxis. Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Parsis and Jews traveling through bustling Bombay commented on this unfortunate misconception between Islam and Terror and voiced the same concern as Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri and The Quilliam Foundation.

When will mainstream media truly pay attention to all the voices of dissent? Like I said , a great stand but one which has been stated by the common man for decades. May this fatwa enter the domain of pop culture and be talked about on twitter, blogs, backyards in Alabama, streets of Kabul, Mc Donalds kitchens and headlines of every big publication Worldwide as much as it was talked about in the Mumbai taxis. Inshallah!

‘The Taxi Takes’ traveled to Trinidad and Tobago recently. I had a screening there for some Trinidadians and even ‘Trini’ Indians with the help of multimedia artist Elspeth Duncan. There was another impromptu screening in Brooklyn thanks to Nicole Jaquis whose project Ascetics with Camera will be traveling to the Kumbh Mela in India this year also.

Kavita Ramdya, author of Bollywood Weddings and journalist at News India Times recently interviewed me and has written an article about ‘The Taxi Takes.‘ Feel free to read it on her site or download the pdf from my press page.  A small piece of misinformation is that I was born in New Delhi and not Mumbai. I am pleased that the core concept of having a dialogue in public spaces – taxi cabs and now the Internet is taking place in this manner!

This website will be undergoing some over hauls and is also planning larger screenings in the near future. The media press kit will be available online for download shortly. I am looking into having a screening at a public venue  in NYC for New York taxi drivers of Indian and Pakistani orign. Watch this space for more details!

It’s beyond ironic to think that President Barack Obama received the Nobel Peace prize. This, just as he makes the largest blunder in the history of wars and orders more troops to catapult an ongoing escalation into another decade of suffering. It has been the aggressive policies post 9/11 that have sharpened the dagger of Islamist terrorism in the World. The Iraqis, the Afghanis have already acted like a forest that is being burnt down in search of a target – sometimes a man named Bin Laden and at other times fictitious Weapons of Mass Destruction. To send more troops into Afghanistan at a time when America is still struggling under economic debt is creating more enemies. In fact this time, I think Obama is creating enemies out of his own American citizens who once believed in ‘change’ and now plead for health reform and more jobs rather than America’s 6th war since the end of WW II.

Artists, writers, news anchors, journalists, filmmakers, poets, trapeze artists and anyone else with a voice and body need to have their say and speak out. The cartoon above was published on Little Alex in Wonderland along with the eloquent and incredible Noam Chomsky‘s ‘take’ on ‘War, Peace and Obama’s Nobel.’ Michael Moore, the famous, talented attention grabbing documentary filmmaker wrote a letter to his president. Huffington Post carries this Open letter to President Obama.

Read it and go have a conversation with your Pakistani cab driver in New York. He’ll probably tell you he’s not planning on taking a trip back home this X’mas. Obama’s choices are creating an inferno of problems in Pakistan and the Indian sub continent. And with this surge, it’s only going to get worse I predict. Unfortunately no ‘Change’ for the better.

Pritish Nandy says we should ‘stop jabbering about 26/11.’ To quote him he says,

” Terrorists do not need to celebrate the success of 9/11 or 26/11. We are doing it for them, even as we weep for the victims and tell the world that we are better prepared to face future strikes. Let’s not kid ourselves. Terrorism is the scourge of our times and no Government, no police force is ever adequately equipped to anticipate it. The more we talk about the pain, the horror, the memories of these terrible events, the more the perpetrators celebrate, the more they go down in history as villains or heroes, depending on who is providing the perspective, and to whom.”

You can read his entire post on the Times of India blog.
Well I commented on his blog post but he didn’t approve my comment so I decided to publish it here. This is my Take.

“I completely disagree. We are not jabbering about our fears, mistakes and failures alone. To be silent would be similar to witnessing the holocaust and remaining quiet about it! Yes I agree, the terrorists do feed off headlines. But that’s where insightful journalism plays a role.
Talk, discuss, deliberate about the future, about larger issues which need to be addressed in the World community as far as Modern Terrorism goes. Give your perspective and yes speak out, in fact shout out against such inhumanity I say.
I’m working on such a project. It’s about taxi drivers and passengers in Mumbai taxis talking about 26/11 and related issues. It’s a new media project called ‘The Taxi Takes on Terror’

So Manmohan Singh and Obama will meet soon or are meeting as I write this. I’m hoping that Mr. Prime Minister of India will not be quiet about 26/11. In my mind given that one year would have gone by since the tragic attacks, no Indian citizen should be quiet.

Famous Anti Nazi Slogan translated into Arabic

“We Will Not Be Silent” was the slogan of one of ‘The White Rose Society‘, one of the few anti Nazi societies which existed in Weimer Germany. This slogan was taken up and became the anti war slogan for several organizations like The Artists Against War.I did a presentation about them and was gifted a T-shirt which has that slogan written in Arabic. Read about Raed Jarrar who was stopped from boarding a flight at JFK for wearing the same t-shirt on Democracy Now.

Nope Mr. Nandy, ‘We Will Not Be Silent.’

Newsweek has done a great job at condensing the news and events of this past decade into a short 7 minute film.

Of course US news and its elections take center stage but pertinently enough Terrorism seems to have dominated this decade in more ways then one. Ofcourse some direct associations can be made with each American President and the corresponding World Wars and events also. Ironically Madonna and Britney Spear’s kiss hogs more screen time than the 26/11 terrorist attacks in Mumbai. A foreboding and predictive way in which the media is already heading towards titillation rather than truthful fact informing. If NDTV made this, would they give Rakhi Sawant’s ‘swayamvar’ more time than the Naxalite problem? Probably yes I say.

The Fort Hood attack and it’s coverage in the US is a scary example of stereo typing and even ignorant reporting. More to come on that.
So will the next ten years have a corresponding increase in headlines on Terror? What’s your prediction?