DVD Sneaks

DVD SNEAKS
129 'best' films: rich, risky and enduring
One critic's must-see titles won't be yours, but let's start talking. Chaplin, Sturges, Brando, and don't forget "The Man With Two Brains."
By Peter Rainer
Special to The Times

April 17, 2005

There is perhaps no greater folly for a critic than prescribing a list of must-see movies for someone else's library. Your psyche is laid bare to the ridicule of those who don't share your own sweet reason. Worse, you look like an ass. In that dark night of the soul, can you really defend "The Man With Two Brains"?

Well, yes, I think I can. Believe me, you have not lived until you've heard Steve Martin pronounce the name of his character in that film — Dr. Michael Hfuhruhurr. You also have not lived until you've seen Max Ophuls' opulent "Earrings of Madame De…." How can these two films possibly coexist in the same galaxy? Ah, but that's the beauty of it. Because our relationship with movies is so intimate, they can be any and all things to us. The oddest extended film families feel right at home with one another. When I was asked to put together this list I responded with the appropriate gravitas, but the truth is, I've been happily tabulating titles for years. The dirty little secret of movie critics is that they are compulsive list makers. Another secret is that, despite the canard that all critics are like George Sanders' Addison DeWitt in "All About Eve," stropping our syllables and slavering for fresh blood, the tribe does possess a beneficent streak: We love it when we can move p
eople to love the same movies we do.

I am not looking for my list to become boringly definitive. Playfulness, principled playfulness, is the order of the day. I don't believe in a canon for literature, and I certainly don't believe in one for film. The medium isn't all that old, and canons are creaky. My roster of 100-plus favorites of all time on DVD, my Harvard Classics, is built upon shifting sands of shifting taste and enough memories to flood a cineplex. And yet in my mind I can instantly summon up any of the films on my wish list; like someone smitten, I knew from the moment I first saw them that they would be with me forever. Still, as a suitor, I like to go slow: Few movies on my list are from the past decade, and that's not just because it's been a weak one. I'm wary of sidestepping the test of time and falling into what I call the "Easy Rider" syndrome. Have you seen that film lately, man? It's aged about as well as a quart of Ripple. I've also soft-pedaled epic-size entries because they look best on
the big screen (assuming you can find a revival house that's showing them).

There are good reasons, historical and otherwise, why many so-called classics are indeed classics, but quite a few of the usual suspects won't be touted here: No "Gone With the Wind," no "Potemkin." I compiled my choices by free association. Off the top of my head, before I checked any reference books, I wrote down the films that meant the most to me, the ones that changed my way of seeing and gave me lasting pleasure (or dread). That initial list numbered several hundred, so draconian decisions were made. I can live with that, and hope you can too. If nothing else, my little ramble may move you to summon up your own movie theater of the mind.

IMPRINTED IN CHILDHOOD

For many of us, our memories of childhood and adolescence are inextricably meshed with the movies we watched growing up. If you saw "The Wizard of Oz" or Walt Disney's "Pinocchio" when you were very young, you could not help but be astonished. They became showpieces of your imagination. But not all showpieces are created equal. Can anyone who saw William Cameron Menzies' starkly surreal "Invaders From Mars" as a child think back on it with anything but abject terror at the image of adults — they could have been one's very own parents, even! — being turned into zombies with icky plugs secreted in the nape of their necks? I was freaked out by "Freaks," which I made the mistake of seeing by myself in a cavernous and mostly empty New York revival house.

It was in that same theater, while in high school, that I discovered Bogart. As a performer seemingly without a whit of pretense, he cut through the crud that made mannerists of so many other actors of his era. I imitated Bogart in "The Maltese Falcon" and "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" and thereby set a near-permanent curl in my snarl. "The Big Sleep" made very little sense to me, and I didn't care (especially not when I learned that Raymond Chandler couldn't figure out the plot either). The teaming of Bogart and Bacall was as sexy as a blues glissando. These birds of paradise are joined forever in noir heaven.

Adolescents in the '60s were often instructed by adults to like movies in the same way that one was supposed to appreciate books — as how-to manuals for civic virtue. One film that actually fit the bill was "To Kill a Mockingbird," with Gregory Peck's Atticus Finch, seen through his daughter's eyes, as a stricken emblem of rectitude — a truly good man. My pronouncedly un-manual-like passion for books back then encouraged the belief that movies could never do justice to great literature. And then I saw David Lean's "Great Expectations," which seemed far more like an emanation than an adaptation of Dickens' work. It had the same visual intensity as his prose. (Think of the desiccated Miss Havisham and her cobwebby precincts.) But for most children of the '60s, loving great movies based on great books was still within the bounds of adult-approved behavior and therefore suspect. "A Hard Day's Night" changed the calculus of moviegoing for us: Here was a film that made it possible
to show our parents what all the fuss was about, what we were all about.

The most cherishable figure of my early moviegoing was undoubtedly Chaplin. He remains so today. The Little Tramp is cinema's ultimate archetype, and yet he is intensely singular; he speaks (or rather, doesn't speak) only to you. This is the secret of his magic. The forlorn dance of the rolls in "The Gold Rush," the slip-sliding through the machinery in "Modern Times" — there is no end to the balletic beauties in Chaplin. James Agee felt that the closing shot of "City Lights," when the blind flower girl, her sight restored, sees the Tramp for the first time, was the greatest moment in movies. After all these years, he's still right.

And what, I hear you ask, about Buster Keaton? He's just about neck and neck with Chaplin, an American original if there ever was one, a vaudeville Dadaist with an eye as spacious and as open to grief (in "The General") as Matthew Brady's. If I had to choose the most sheerly enjoyable Keaton, I would go with "Steamboat Bill, Jr.," with its cyclone finale that upends Buster in one great gusty whoosh, as if the gods had just discovered whoopee and could not conceal their glee.

A few of my comic choices are not homegrown: Bertrand Blier's carnal phantasmagoria "Get Out Your Handkerchiefs," Bill Forsyth's moonstruck "Local Hero" and Pedro Almodóvar's sleazy-swanky "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown," with its pop art colorations. But you don't have to cross borders to fill your comedy quotient. You don't even have to go beyond Preston Sturges, whose movies only get better with age. "The Lady Eve" is probably our premier romantic comedy. Remember Henry Fonda intoning "Snakes are my life"? "The Palm Beach Story" bequeathed to the world the Ale and Quail Club, which is legacy enough for any mortal.

The great comedies are pretty much great all the way through, but we often still remember them for a single standout sequence: There's W.C. Fields in "It's a Gift" trying valiantly to snooze on the porch amid the clangor of the milkman and the pest who keeps inquiring about the whereabouts of K-a-r-l L-a-F-o-n-g. Or Stan and Ollie's marvelous soft-shoe dance in "Way Out West." Or Albert Brooks trying to explain to Garry Marshall in "Lost in America" why it would be a smart promotional idea for the casino to return his losses. Or lovelorn Gene Wilder, infatuated by a sheep in "Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex," chugging Woolite. (When it comes to Woody Allen, I'm in the "earlier, funnier movies" camp.) It is deeply unfair to reduce "Some Like It Hot" to its final line, "Nobody's perfect," but it's the fizziest parting shot in the history of movies, so what can you do?

Horror is supposed to be comedy's flip side, but many of our strongest scarefests are a shimmer of both, like "Blue Velvet," that dark-toned cackle. Or Brian DePalma's "Carrie," or "Jaws," or "Night of the Hunter." "Dr. Strangelove" belongs in this crowd, and so does "The Manchurian Candidate." They both mine the Cold War for apocalyptic slapstick. "Psycho" is a species of comedy, although the joke is on the audience. (Norman: "Mother isn't feeling quite herself today.") European horror movies tend to be graver. The schizo ventriloquist sequence with Michael Redgrave, from "Dead of Night," is enough to give anyone a permanent case of the heebie-jeebies. F.W. Murnau's "Nosferatu" is the vampire movie Hieronymus Bosch would have made if he'd had a camera.

The humanist tradition in film — in which people, perish the thought, are placed first — is looking a bit antiquated in these gizmo'd times. But many of the movies and moviemakers I care about the most have operated within that tradition. In this country, there may be no greater modern example than Martin Ritt's "Sounder," a sharecropper drama that is truly a romance of the spirit. The Canadian Claude Jutra's "My Uncle Antoine," set in a mining town, should be better known than it is. It deserves pride of place alongside the best coming-of-age films ever made. Before he turned into an orgiast, Fellini made poetic allegories like "La Strada," which was influenced by D.W. Griffith's "Broken Blossoms," another film of surpassing poignancy. We are brought so close to the feral boy in Truffaut's "The Wild Child" that, in the end, it is profoundly unsettling to realize that he is unknowable — as we all are.

Truffaut's spiritual mentor, Jean Renoir, is the most lyrical of humanists, with an almost ecstatic comprehension of frailty; a world without "Grand Illusion" and "Rules of the Game" is as unthinkable as a world without Mozart. De Sica's "Bicycle Thief" and "Umberto D" are tragedies of such frightful clarity that we are made to see sorrow whole. Satyajit Ray's Apu trilogy is, for me, with the possible exception of the first two parts of "The Godfather," the greatest sustained achievement in film. (Both are family epics.) Ray had an abiding passion for the sanctity of human experience, which is what Yasujiro Ozu also had, and never more so than in his masterpiece, "Tokyo Story" — a movie so resonant with death and loss that it seems to hold within its rapt stillnesses an entire universe of feeling.


NATURAL BEAUTIES

A few select film artists have such an intuitive grasp of the poetic nature of the medium that they give us new eyes. I would place in this rarefied company movies as disparate as "Earth," Alexander Dovzhenko's agrarian ode, and Werner Herzog's "Aguirre, The Wrath of God," with Klaus Kinski's gargoyle of a conquistador on his infernal Amazonian quest. Jean Cocteau's "Beauty and the Beast" and "Orpheus" are peerlessly disturbing fantasias that bring us back to our earliest experiences listening to fairy tales. The barge trip along the Seine in Jean Vigo's "L'Atalante" is supremely sensual; no sequence is more erotic than the one in which the young husband and wife, suddenly separated and alone, conjure up each other's caresses. Robert Altman's hushed "McCabe & Mrs. Miller" has the visionary thrill of a western entirely reimagined: Its brutality bleeds through a palette as delicate as the wash of a Japanese screen painting.

It's supposed to be a given that filmed theater is stagy and bad books make better movies than good books. For the most part, this may be true. But just as Dickens would not, I trust, have blanched at Lean's "Great Expectations," I would like to think that Isaac Bashevis Singer, cantankerous as he was, would have appreciated Paul Mazursky's masterful "Enemies, A Love Story." Perhaps Chekhov would have wept at Josef Heifitz's "Lady With a Dog," a perfect transcription of his short story. Sidney Lumet's "Long Day's Journey Into Night" and Louis Malle's "Vanya on 42nd Street" are paragons of filmed theater for the simple reason that the best actors in the best parts have been shot in the best way — without a lot of whirlybird pyrotechnics. The same is true for our best musicals, from "Singin' in the Rain" and "The Band Wagon" to "Cabaret": Above all, these films are celebrations of performance.

Many of the finest film artists have also been men of the theater, and their film work is a tribute to both worlds. Ingmar Bergman's "The Magic Flute," the greatest opera movie ever made, is no less cinematic than his passion plays; Mike Leigh's Gilbert and Sullivan biography "Topsy-Turvy" is as full-bodied an emotional experience as any of his contemporary urban dramas. The Carné-Prévert "Children of Paradise" is about a life in the theater, and no more voluptuous movie experience exists. Olivier's "Henry V," which revels in its theatrical origins (it opens with stage curtains parting), is as rich a Shakespearean celebration as Orson Welles' "Chimes at Midnight/Falstaff," which has a battle sequence so harrowing that it can hold its own with Shakespeare's language.

Of course, Welles, like Hitchcock ("Vertigo," "Strangers on a Train," "North by Northwest"), could fill up a Great Movies list all on his own; for my purposes here, I'd also check off "Touch of Evil," "The Magnificent Ambersons" and — what's the name of that other one, that warhorse about the newspaper guy and his sled?

Brando should get his own list too. Most actors give you one emotional level; a few can give you two simultaneously, a handful of great ones maybe three. Brando could give you five. For all his touted Method training, he had the instincts and the insight of a great novelist: As Stanley Kowalski in "A Streetcar Named Desire," Terry Malloy in "On the Waterfront," Don Vito Corleone in "The Godfather" or Paul in "Last Tango in Paris," his characterizations were so burstingly complex that he made almost every other actor in the business seem like a hologram by comparison.

But great acting is a big reason we go to the movies, and Brando has company in the pantheon: Daniel Day-Lewis in "My Left Foot," Maria Falconetti in "The Passion of Joan of Arc," Peter Lorre in "M," Laurence Olivier in "The Entertainer" (his greatest non-Shakespearean appearance), Isabelle Adjani in "The Story of Adele H," Al Pacino in "Dog Day Afternoon," Robert De Niro in "Taxi Driver" (which I prefer even to "Raging Bull." It's a performance without any antecedents — pure, transfixed fury). Big smashing star performances are a major reason we go to the movies too. In "Funny Girl," a star really was born.

During a time of fanatic religiosity, it's tonic to look at a movie like Robert Bresson's "Diary of a Country Priest" or Fred Zinnemann's "The Nun's Story" and recognize that faith on film can be shown in all its transforming mysteriousness; the rivers need not run red as proof of piety.

And in a time of war, it is necessary to look at the great films that have grappled with the shock and obscenity of violence, not just the famous ones like "The Seven Samurai," "The Wild Bunch," "Bonnie and Clyde" and "The Battle of Algiers" but also Krzysztof Kieslowski's "A Short Film About Killing," which has a protracted murder scene in a taxi that drives home like no other movie the sensation of watching a life being taken away. War in all its aspects has never been depicted more voluminously than in Marcel Ophuls' World War II documentary "The Sorrow and the Pity," which ends up being about everything — because war brings out everything.

I wonder if, decades from now, a new crop of masterpieces will be crowding out these titles. Or will the industry become so digitized and commodified that masterpieces will be like rare birds? In fragile times, it's best to stock up on supplies. Here are 100-plus movies to savor in the storm.



The movie lover's must-haves

Not every important film is available on DVD — see the accompanying list for some we're still waiting for — but here's a collection of discs that deserve room in your library. From Almodóvar to Zinnemann, there's something for everyone.


Aguirre, The Wrath of God
(Werner Herzog, 1972)

A Hard Day's Night
(Richard Lester, 1964)

Alexander Nevsky
(Sergei Eisenstein, 1938)

The Apu trilogy
(Satyajit Ray):
Pather Panchali (1955)
Aparajito (1956)
The World of Apu (1959)

A Short Film About Killing
(Krzysztof Kieslowski, 1988)

A Streetcar Named Desire
(Elia Kazan, 1951)

The Band Wagon
(Vincente Minnelli, 1953)

The Battle of Algiers
(Gillo Pontecorvo, 1965)

Beauty and the Beast
(Jean Cocteau, 1946)

The Best Years of Our Lives
(William Wyler, 1946)

The Bicycle Thief
(Vittorio De Sica, 1947)

The Big Sleep
(Howard Hawks, 1946)

The Birth of a Nation
(D.W. Griffith, 1915)

Blue Velvet
(David Lynch, 1986)

Bonnie and Clyde
(Arthur Penn, 1967)

Breathless
(Jean-Luc Godard, 1959)

Bringing Up Baby
(Howard Hawks, 1938)

Broken Blossoms
(D.W. Griffith, 1919)

Cabaret
(Bob Fosse, 1972)

Carrie
(Brian De Palma, 1976)

Children of Paradise
(Marcel Carné, 1945)

Chimes at Midnight/Falstaff
(Orson Welles, 1966)

Chinatown
(Roman Polanski, 1974)

Christ Stopped at Eboli
(Francesco Rosi, 1979)

City Lights
(Charles Chaplin, 1931)

Crumb
(Terry Zwigoff, 1994)

Day of Wrath
(Carl Dreyer, 1943)

Dead of Night
(Alberto Cavalcanti episode, 1945)

Diary of a Country Priest
(Robert Bresson, 1950)

Dog Day Afternoon
(Sidney Lumet, 1975)

Double Indemnity
(Billy Wilder, 1944)

Dr. Strangelove
(Stanley Kubrick, 1964)

Duck Soup
(Leo McCarey, 1933)

The Earrings of Madame De …
(Max Ophuls, 1953)

Earth
(Alexander Dovzhenko, 1930)

8 1/2
(Federico Fellini, 1963)

The Empire Strikes Back (Star Wars — Episode 5)
(Irvin Kerschner, 1980)

Enemies, A Love Story
(Paul Mazursky, 1989)

The Entertainer
(Tony Richardson, 1960)

E.T.
(Steven Spielberg, 1982)

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex
(Woody Allen, 1972)

Freaks
(Tod Browning, 1932)

>From Here to Eternity
(Fred Zinnemann, 1953)

Funny Girl
(William Wyler, 1968)

The General
(Buster Keaton, Clyde Bruckman, 1927)

Get Out Your Handkerchiefs
(Bertrand Blier, 1978)

The Godfather
(Francis Ford Coppola, 1972)

The Godfather Part II
(Francis Ford Coppola, 1974)

The Gold Rush
(Charles Chaplin, 1925)

Grand Illusion
(Jean Renoir, 1937)

The Great Escape
(John Sturges, 1963)

Great Expectations
(David Lean, 1946)

Henry V
(Laurence Olivier, 1945)

His Girl Friday
(Howard Hawks, 1940)

Ikiru
(Akira Kurosawa, 1952)

Intolerance
(D.W. Griffith, 1916)

Invaders From Mars
(William Cameron Menzies, 1953)

It's a Gift
(Norman Z. McLeod, 1934)

Jaws
(Steven Spielberg, 1975)

The Lady Eve
(Preston Sturges, 1941)

Lady With a Dog
(Josef Heifitz, 1959)

Last Laugh
(F.W. Murnau, 1924)

La Strada
(Federico Fellini, 1954)

Last Tango in Paris
(Bernardo Bertolucci, 1973)

L'Atalante
(Jean Vigo, 1934)

L'Avventura
(Michelangelo Antonioni, 1960)

The Leopard
(Luchino Visconti, 1963)

Local Hero
(Bill Forsyth, 1983)

Lolita
(Stanley Kubrick, 1962)

Long Day's Journey Into Night
(Sidney Lumet, 1962)

The Long Good Friday
(John Mackenzie, 1980)

Lost in America
(Albert Brooks, 1985)

M
(Fritz Lang, 1931)

The Magic Flute
(Ingmar Bergman, 1974)

The Maltese Falcon
(John Huston, 1941)

The Manchurian Candidate
(John Frankenheimer, 1962)

The Man Who Would Be King
(John Huston, 1975)

The Man With Two Brains
(Carl Reiner, 1983)

MASH
(Robert Altman, 1970)

McCabe & Mrs. Miller
(Robert Altman, 1971)

Mean Streets
(Martin Scorsese, 1973)

Modern Times
(Charles Chaplin, 1936)

Monsieur Verdoux
(Charles Chaplin, 1947)

My Left Foot
(Jim Sheridan, 1989)

My Uncle Antoine
(Claude Jutra, 1971)

Napoleon
(Abel Gance, 1927)

The Night of the Hunter
(Charles Laughton, 1955)

North by Northwest
(Alfred Hitchcock, 1959)

Nosferatu
(F.W. Murnau, 1922)

The Nun's Story
(Fred Zinnemann, 1959)

On the Waterfront
(Elia Kazan, 1954)

Orpheus
(Jean Cocteau, 1949)

The Palm Beach Story
(Preston Sturges, 1942)

The Passion of Joan of Arc
(Carl Dreyer, 1928)

Pennies From Heaven
(Herbert Ross, 1981)

Pinocchio
(Ben Sharpsteen, Hamilton Luske, 1940)

Psycho
(Alfred Hitchcock, 1960)

The Rules of the Game
(Jean Renoir, 1939)

The Seven Samurai
(Akira Kurosawa, 1954)

Singin' in the Rain
(Stanley Donen, Gene Kelly, 1952)

Smiles of a Summer Night
(Ingmar Bergman, 1955)

Some Like It Hot
(Billy Wilder, 1959)

The Sorrow and the Pity
(Marcel Ophuls, 1970)

Sounder
(Martin Ritt, 1972)

Spirited Away
(Hayao Miyazaki, 2001)

Steamboat Bill, Jr.
(Charles Riesner, 1928)

The Story of Adele H
(François Truffaut, 1975)

Strangers on a Train
(Alfred Hitchcock, 1951)

Sweet Smell of Success
(Alexander Mackendrick, 1957)

Taxi Driver
(Martin Scorsese, 1976)

The Third Man
(Carol Reed, 1949)

Time Out
(Laurent Cantet, 2001)

To Kill a Mockingbird
(Robert Mulligan, 1962)

Tokyo Story
(Yasujiro Ozu, 1953)

Topsy-Turvy
(Mike Leigh, 1999)

The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
(John Huston, 1948)

The Triplets of Belleville
(Sylvain Chomet, 2003)

Triumph of the Will
(Leni Riefenstahl, 1935)

Umberto D
(Vittorio De Sica, 1952)

Vanya on 42nd Street
(Louis Malle, 1994)

Vertigo
(Alfred Hitchcock, 1958)

Waiting for Guffman
(Christopher Guest, 1997)

Way Out West
(James W. Horne, 1937)

The Wild Bunch
(Sam Peckinpah, 1969)

The Wild Child
(François Truffaut, 1970)

The Wizard of Oz
(Victor Fleming, 1939)

Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
(Pedro Almodóvar, 1988)




Peter Rainer, past president of the National Society of Film Critics and a former Los Angeles Times movie critic, reviews for KPCC's "Film Week" and KCET's "Life and Times

Stew Much

Stew Much

A duck once met a porcupine; they formed a corporation
Which called itself a Porcuduck (a beastly conjugation!).

A stork to a turtle said, "Let's put my head upon your torso;
We who are so pretty now, as Stortle would be more so!"

The lizard with the parrot's head thought: taking to the chilli
After years of eating worms is absolutely silly.

A prancing goat - one wonders why - was driven by a need
To bequeath its upper portion to a crawling centipede.

The giraffe with grasshopper's limbs reflected: Why should I
Go for walks in grassy fields, now that I can fly?

The nice contented cow will doubtless get a frightful shock
On finding that its lower lombs belong to a fighting cock.

It's obvious the Whalephant is not a happy notion:
The head goes for the jungle, while the tail turns to the ocean,

The lion's lack of horns distressed him greatly, so
He teamed up with a deer - now watch his antlers grow!

-- Sukumar Ray
translated by Satyajit Ray

The New Pope's Biggest Challenge

Clerical Celibacy: the New Pope’s Greatest Challenge



By Rabbi Shmuley Boteach



The newly elected Pope Benedict XVI is 78 years old, the College of Cardinals having chosen to go with an elderly leader who continues the conservatism of his illustrious predecessor, John Paul II. Those who feel that the new Pope is too old to be really effective should keep in mind that it is only we in the decadent West that so glamorize youth and treat age as a decrepit disease. In the Bible, King Solomon describes his youth as his winter and his old-age as his summer. In his youth he was prone to the biting cold of errors and egocentrism. When he grew older he was warmed by the light of wisdom and hence experienced a thaw. It is only we who live surrounded by a plastic pop culture that treat the elderly as withered animals that ought to be sent out to pasture. In times gone by the elderly were respected as pious mentors. It is good to see us returning to a time when a man almost eighty can become the most venerated religious leader alive rather than be confined to a sundeck in Florida.



But 78 does mean that the new pope will have to act quickly if he wishes to leave a lasting legacy and help revitalize the Church, especially in Europe, its first home, where it is in sharp decline. And after wishing my heartfelt congratulations and sincere good wishes to my Catholic brothers and sisters on the election of their new pope, and amid the recognition of the proper humility by which a member of another faith gives advice to his Christian brethren, I must sound off on what I feel is the greatest issue confronting Catholicism, namely, the issue of clerical celibacy.



Religion is, above all else, about the family. It’s about a man and a woman practicing love to each other in a G-dly framework, and bringing children into the world that will lead a G-dly life and continue in the pathways of the religious tradition. All this is contradicted when the very leaders of the Church are not allowed to marry or have children themselves.



As we try and create a society where women are respected by men, where the fairer sex are treated as beings that domesticate and civilize men, what message does it send that those who run the Church can live without a woman? How can a Priest properly convey to his flock that sexuality can be sanctified and that love is holy, when it appears as though he must remove himself from the possible corruption of a physical relationship since he is wholly consecrated to G-d? Will young boys learn to respect and venerate women if he never witnesses the dignified affection between a Priest and his bride? Is a good woman not a conduit, rather than an impediment, to G-d?



And is it not unrealistic, not to mention inhumane, to ask a man who wants to serve G-d and the community with all his heart to go through life without a companion, to know only the external love of congregants rather than the intimate love of a soul-mate? Is it fair to ask a man to have no real home, no real warmth by which to be nurtured, to give and give but to never receive?



It has been my honor to have been a Rabbi since the tender age of 21. The Rabbinate is my life’s calling, being a teacher of Judaism and Biblical values my highest passion. But I declare unequivocally that if the pursuit of this calling had forced me to give up marriage or the possibility of children, I would never have considered it in the first place. I could not bare the loneliness or the cruelty of a life in which my most private self could never be shared, where my deepest self could never be known. And I would have been angry at G-d for having demanded so unG-dly a sacrifice.



And if my communal responsibilities began to seriously interfere with the health of my marriage or my availability to my children, then I would have to curtail those responsibilities and put my family first. I realize that this is one of the arguments as to why Priests should not marry, so that they may focus all their energies on their communities. But when you have a family you are given ever greater energies. When you have children you learn a far deeper form of love then you ever thought possible. And then you can share that with your congregants.



Amid all the coverage on the death of the Pope John Paul II, and the commentary on the global outpouring of grief occasioned by his passing, almost noone commented on the tragedy of this great man having no immediate family members present at the time of his illness or demise. He was mourned as a Pope, as an institution, as a warm and caring leader. But he was not mourned as a man, as a husband, as a grandfather. One can only imagine, and commiserate with, the extreme loneliness of the Pope as he suffered through illness without the gentle touch of a wife, or the warm embrace of his own child, to give him the intimate caring that only family can provide.



And can Catholicism really hope to grow in the West if Priests are not allowed to marry? I refer not only to the terrible dearth of Priests in Europe, the sharp decline caused primarily by most young men’s refusal to embrace clerical celibacy. Indeed, as the NY Times recently reported, in all of France last year, only 90 priests were ordained, compared with 566 in 1966. But I refer even more to the inability of a celibate priest to really impact on a community. When a Priest cannot have a family that invites congregants in to see a living example of a faith-based family unit, his effectiveness as a spiritual leader is severely compromised.



As a Rabbi I know that the best way to bring people into the faith is to have them over to your home, to share with them a warm family dinner, to have them interact with your kids and show them that the religious life is one suffused with abundant and infinite blessing. In the Jewish religion a Rabbi who doesn’t open his home to his community is sure to fail at his vocation. He is much more successful laughing with congregants over a warm meal than delivering even his best sermon from the pulpit. The principal forum for religion is not the Church of the Synagogue, but the home, the place where spiritual values can be married with everyday living. But Catholicism deprives itself of the ability to directly impact on congregants by denying Priests real homes to which they can invite their flock.



I also believe that clerical celibacy is the factor that was most responsible for the pedophile Priest scandal, but not for the reasons you’ve already heard. It’s not that Priests are denied sex, and therefore act out in an aberrant fashion, a silly argument which suggests that sexual violence is a product of sexual denial. Less so is it a function of the Priesthood attracting pedophiles in the first place who think that the clerical orders will cure them of their dangerous predisposition, another silly argument which in reality is a disguised and unjust attack against Catholicism. Rather, I believe the issue is that since Catholicism insists that priests not marry, a priest is forced to interact with children as an individual rather than as the head of a household, as a person rather than as a family man. As such, these attachments become too personal and too close.



As a Rabbi, when I counsel couples, women, or even kids, it is almost always done at my home, where my wife and kids are present, even though they may not in the room at the time of the counseling. Hence, there is a general family atmosphere, and the person who comes to see me gets to know the family just as they get to know me. But a priest has no such environment and the counseling he offers women and children is therefore always between two individuals rather than between a family and an individual. There is no wife to protect the Priest from attachments that grow too intimate.



As the world’s most populous religion, the health of Catholicism directly impacts the health of every other religion. And it is therefore my sincere hope that Pope Benedict XVI will succeed where the great Pope John Paul II did not, namely, in reviving Church attendance and affiliation in the great democracies of the West. He can begin by tackling the issue of clerical celibacy head on.





Rabbi Shmuley Boteach is a nationally syndicated radio host and was named by Talkers magazine as one of America’s 100 most important talk-radio hosts. A best-selling author of 15 books, his latest work is "Hating Women: America's Hostile Campaign Against the Fairer Sex" (ReganBooks-HarperCollins). To learn more about Rabbi Boteach, please visit his website at www.shmuley.com.

Schindler's List Ten Years On

The man from Mayyazhi muses
M.Mukundan , the famous Malayali writer, speaks with Sunil K Poolani about his work, his creative pursuits and Malayali Literature.
..................

When I grew up M Mukundan was one of the four Malayalam writers who made a deep impact on my psyche (and to some extent on my physique). The other three were O V Vijayan, Balachandran Chullikkad and C R Parameswaran. It's another factor, though, that today, two decades later, I consider Vaikom Muhammed Basheer, VKN and M P Narayana Pillai as the best writers Malayalam has ever produced.

Coming back to Mukundan, I still consider that there is possibly no other Malayali who could write in as simple and expressive manner as he does.



Some time back, I was sitting with him in his Maruti van, and while driving through the dirty lanes of Chandni Chowk in Delhi, he told me: "Delhi can be wonderful."That is if you think it is." For Mukundan, Delhi, like his native land, is an inseparable part of his writing. The smell and noise of the city have been effectively portrayed in almost half his works. His interest in painting, sculpture, drama, music and dance developed during his thirty-five-year-old stay in Delhi and also left deep marks on his writing.

Mukundan's works were consumed eagerly by the dislocated and the hallucinated youth of Kerala, right from the sixties. His works characterized the restless youth, their discontentments and ambivalence, their bitter experience with the so-called radical and progressive thinking and activism, their seeking solace in drugs and alcohol, their bohemian and nomadic nature - all were portrayed amicably by the man from Mayyazhi, a French colony till India's Independence. His craft was so explosively potential that his readers could identify themselves with Mukundan's characters easily and even find solace in them. No joking.

About him. Mukundan was born in 1942. He wrote his first story in 1961. His main works are: Ananthan's Sorrow, On The Banks Of The River Mayyazhi, This World And A Man In It, Delhi (all novels), The Wedding Of The Goldsmith's Daughter, Child, The House, Mukundan's Stories (story collections) and What is Modernism (essays).


Mukundan is the recipient of the Central Sahitya Akademy Award (for his novel God's Mischiefs). A film based on it fetched him the Best Screenplay Award for the year 1993. He has also the winner of Kerala Sahitya Akademi and M P Paul awards.

Mukundan works as the coordinator of cultural exchange programmes at the French Embassy, New Delhi. He lives with his wife (his son and daughter are married and settled in different places).

We got out of his van, walked into his Delhi barsati, and started talking. Just like that.

When did you start writing stories?
Before I went to school. Since I didn't know the alphabet then, I wrote with images. They were written for myself; in a language only I could comprehend. I wrote my first story in my mother tongue when I was fourteen.

And when did you publish your work? Did you have any difficulty getting your stories published?
My work was first published in a leading weekly when I was twenty. The first story was rejected. But the second found its way in, and subsequent stories appeared in various weeklies with facility.

What were the thematic elements of your works?
At the outset, I wrote about the people and the milieu I was familiar with. Most of my characters were living people. I portrayed them as they were and found myself in trouble very often; when my third story appeared in print, the parents of a girl who was with me in school went to the lawyer to file a defamation suit against me. But later on, I learnt the art of altering living people's images. I changed them to the extent that they could not identify themselves. All fictional characters are metamorphoses of living people.

Who inspired you in your creative pursuits?
Myself. My unfulfilled dreams, my solitude and my anguish were the sources of my inspiration.


Print this page | Email to a friend | Letters to the Editor


I believe your novels, especially your chef d'oeuvre, On The Banks Of The River Mayyazhi, distinctly created a scar on the psyche of the youth in Kerala - the disillusioned, both spiritually and rationalistically orphaned youth who sought solace in drugs and alcohol. Some still accuse that your drug-addict characters influenced the youngsters, so much so that they even tried to emulate your characters - searching absolute truth in spiritual anarchy. How do yon react to this accusation?
We know that living people influence characters. Now we are told that characters influence living people. I never wrote stories or novels to influence anyone. It was the young readers who identified themselves with my characters. Perhaps I was writing about them. Sometime ago, a young reader told me, 'Look, you destroyed my future. On reading your books, I decided to discontinue my studies and I took to drugs.' I felt sorry for him, but if all readers get influenced by what they read, the world wouldn't be the way it is any more.

How has your contact with France, the French language and culture, influenced your writings?
French literature and cinema have helped me evolve a new form of writing. But so far as the content of my books is concerned, it is not French. It is not Indian either - it is Malayali.

What do you think of contemporary Malayalam literature?
In the post-Independence period, responding to the distant call of Marxian ethos, it left its own fertile land and wandered off to an illusory land of promises - socialist realism. And from there, it again wandered away, this time to the modernity of the 1960s. Now, like a prodigal son, it is coming, back to its own fold - emaciated, but holding forth a new found promise - its own identity.

What is this identity?
Everything that is Malayali. For example, when we worship Lord Vishnu, we are worshipping an Indian supreme god. But when we lie prostrate at the feet of a local deity, like Kuttichchathan, it is a little god, not as powerful as Lord Shiva, whose area of wielding power is restricted perhaps to a panchayat. But then, it is a Malayali god.

Whose writing do you most appreciate in Malayalam?
My favorite writer is Uroob. No other Malayali novelist has had that kind of ever-widening vision and reach. Were he alive, he would have been recognized as the greatest contemporary Malayali writer.

Among other storywriters in Kerala you stand apart - differing in style, structure and authenticity. Do you think that your writings as a whole deal with contemporary issues - material or spiritual?
Good writing, like good music, is an exercise in spirituality. But I do not make any conscious efforts to relate my writings to any such issues or problems. A work of art should have a purpose other than being well written. Writing itself is a complete accomplishment. But if any social or philosophical issue spontaneously finds its way into the work of a writer, it is fine.



In what way does modernity affect the Malayalam short story, especially yours?
Modernity's main contribution to Malayalam short story is that it evaporated the divide between form and content. This is truer of Malayalam poets, especially Ayyappa Panicker and Vinayachandran.

How did painting and other visual art forms inspire you, and how did they help you in your writings?
I have tried to give the rhythm of music to my style in some of my stories. For example in The Wedding Of The Goldsmith's Daughter. From my contact with painting, I felt that a writer can arrange the space in his text, much in the same fashion as a painter arranges the space in his canvas.

What is your opinion about your counterparts and their oeuvre in other Indian languages?
I haven't read much in other Indian languages. From what I have read, I feel closer to Bengali writers. Translations of the works of other Indian regional writers are rare. That is perhaps why I feel more familiar with Latin American or European literature than Hindi literature. I know a lot about Milan Kundera or Umberto Eco, but I hardly know anything about... I don't know even all the names of leading Hindi writers. A shame indeed, but whom to blame? I can't learn all Indian languages to read the books of the leading writers in those languages.


----------------------


About the Author
Sunil K. Poolani is a senior journalist and writer. He lives in Mumbai

http://66.70.178.223/VU/20031030/interactives_spotlight_mukundan.shtml

The Man from Mayyazahi

The man from Mayyazhi muses
M.Mukundan , the famous Malayali writer, speaks with Sunil K Poolani about his work, his creative pursuits and Malayali Literature.
..................

When I grew up M Mukundan was one of the four Malayalam writers who made a deep impact on my psyche (and to some extent on my physique). The other three were O V Vijayan, Balachandran Chullikkad and C R Parameswaran. It's another factor, though, that today, two decades later, I consider Vaikom Muhammed Basheer, VKN and M P Narayana Pillai as the best writers Malayalam has ever produced.

Coming back to Mukundan, I still consider that there is possibly no other Malayali who could write in as simple and expressive manner as he does.



Some time back, I was sitting with him in his Maruti van, and while driving through the dirty lanes of Chandni Chowk in Delhi, he told me: "Delhi can be wonderful."That is if you think it is." For Mukundan, Delhi, like his native land, is an inseparable part of his writing. The smell and noise of the city have been effectively portrayed in almost half his works. His interest in painting, sculpture, drama, music and dance developed during his thirty-five-year-old stay in Delhi and also left deep marks on his writing.

Mukundan's works were consumed eagerly by the dislocated and the hallucinated youth of Kerala, right from the sixties. His works characterized the restless youth, their discontentments and ambivalence, their bitter experience with the so-called radical and progressive thinking and activism, their seeking solace in drugs and alcohol, their bohemian and nomadic nature - all were portrayed amicably by the man from Mayyazhi, a French colony till India's Independence. His craft was so explosively potential that his readers could identify themselves with Mukundan's characters easily and even find solace in them. No joking.

About him. Mukundan was born in 1942. He wrote his first story in 1961. His main works are: Ananthan's Sorrow, On The Banks Of The River Mayyazhi, This World And A Man In It, Delhi (all novels), The Wedding Of The Goldsmith's Daughter, Child, The House, Mukundan's Stories (story collections) and What is Modernism (essays).


Mukundan is the recipient of the Central Sahitya Akademy Award (for his novel God's Mischiefs). A film based on it fetched him the Best Screenplay Award for the year 1993. He has also the winner of Kerala Sahitya Akademi and M P Paul awards.

Mukundan works as the coordinator of cultural exchange programmes at the French Embassy, New Delhi. He lives with his wife (his son and daughter are married and settled in different places).

We got out of his van, walked into his Delhi barsati, and started talking. Just like that.

When did you start writing stories?
Before I went to school. Since I didn't know the alphabet then, I wrote with images. They were written for myself; in a language only I could comprehend. I wrote my first story in my mother tongue when I was fourteen.

And when did you publish your work? Did you have any difficulty getting your stories published?
My work was first published in a leading weekly when I was twenty. The first story was rejected. But the second found its way in, and subsequent stories appeared in various weeklies with facility.

What were the thematic elements of your works?
At the outset, I wrote about the people and the milieu I was familiar with. Most of my characters were living people. I portrayed them as they were and found myself in trouble very often; when my third story appeared in print, the parents of a girl who was with me in school went to the lawyer to file a defamation suit against me. But later on, I learnt the art of altering living people's images. I changed them to the extent that they could not identify themselves. All fictional characters are metamorphoses of living people.

Who inspired you in your creative pursuits?
Myself. My unfulfilled dreams, my solitude and my anguish were the sources of my inspiration.


Print this page | Email to a friend | Letters to the Editor


I believe your novels, especially your chef d'oeuvre, On The Banks Of The River Mayyazhi, distinctly created a scar on the psyche of the youth in Kerala - the disillusioned, both spiritually and rationalistically orphaned youth who sought solace in drugs and alcohol. Some still accuse that your drug-addict characters influenced the youngsters, so much so that they even tried to emulate your characters - searching absolute truth in spiritual anarchy. How do yon react to this accusation?
We know that living people influence characters. Now we are told that characters influence living people. I never wrote stories or novels to influence anyone. It was the young readers who identified themselves with my characters. Perhaps I was writing about them. Sometime ago, a young reader told me, 'Look, you destroyed my future. On reading your books, I decided to discontinue my studies and I took to drugs.' I felt sorry for him, but if all readers get influenced by what they read, the world wouldn't be the way it is any more.

How has your contact with France, the French language and culture, influenced your writings?
French literature and cinema have helped me evolve a new form of writing. But so far as the content of my books is concerned, it is not French. It is not Indian either - it is Malayali.

What do you think of contemporary Malayalam literature?
In the post-Independence period, responding to the distant call of Marxian ethos, it left its own fertile land and wandered off to an illusory land of promises - socialist realism. And from there, it again wandered away, this time to the modernity of the 1960s. Now, like a prodigal son, it is coming, back to its own fold - emaciated, but holding forth a new found promise - its own identity.

What is this identity?
Everything that is Malayali. For example, when we worship Lord Vishnu, we are worshipping an Indian supreme god. But when we lie prostrate at the feet of a local deity, like Kuttichchathan, it is a little god, not as powerful as Lord Shiva, whose area of wielding power is restricted perhaps to a panchayat. But then, it is a Malayali god.

Whose writing do you most appreciate in Malayalam?
My favorite writer is Uroob. No other Malayali novelist has had that kind of ever-widening vision and reach. Were he alive, he would have been recognized as the greatest contemporary Malayali writer.

Among other storywriters in Kerala you stand apart - differing in style, structure and authenticity. Do you think that your writings as a whole deal with contemporary issues - material or spiritual?
Good writing, like good music, is an exercise in spirituality. But I do not make any conscious efforts to relate my writings to any such issues or problems. A work of art should have a purpose other than being well written. Writing itself is a complete accomplishment. But if any social or philosophical issue spontaneously finds its way into the work of a writer, it is fine.



In what way does modernity affect the Malayalam short story, especially yours?
Modernity's main contribution to Malayalam short story is that it evaporated the divide between form and content. This is truer of Malayalam poets, especially Ayyappa Panicker and Vinayachandran.

How did painting and other visual art forms inspire you, and how did they help you in your writings?
I have tried to give the rhythm of music to my style in some of my stories. For example in The Wedding Of The Goldsmith's Daughter. From my contact with painting, I felt that a writer can arrange the space in his text, much in the same fashion as a painter arranges the space in his canvas.

What is your opinion about your counterparts and their oeuvre in other Indian languages?
I haven't read much in other Indian languages. From what I have read, I feel closer to Bengali writers. Translations of the works of other Indian regional writers are rare. That is perhaps why I feel more familiar with Latin American or European literature than Hindi literature. I know a lot about Milan Kundera or Umberto Eco, but I hardly know anything about... I don't know even all the names of leading Hindi writers. A shame indeed, but whom to blame? I can't learn all Indian languages to read the books of the leading writers in those languages.


----------------------


About the Author
Sunil K. Poolani is a senior journalist and writer. He lives in Mumbai

http://66.70.178.223/VU/20031030/interactives_spotlight_mukundan.shtml

Homage to Huesca

Homage in Huesca
Shashi Tharoor raises his cup to Catalonia
Outlook Traveler
June 2001

Why Huesca?" our friends asked when my wife and I told them where we wanted to go. It was 1980 and we were on our first visit to Spain, then newly emerged into democracy after four decades of Franco's fascism. But Huesca was no tourist spot: it was an obscure town on the way to nowhere. To get there, we would have to risk country roads of unpredictable quality. And then our homeward ascent through the Pyrenees, we were warned, would be unnecessarily arduous. "Forget it," our friends said.

We couldn't. There was something we had to do in Huesca.


So we wound our way tortuously through Sierra de la Peña's rugged hills , till the road flattened out across deserted scrubland and a weatherbeaten sign told us we had reached our destination.

Huesca was as nondescript a provincial town as our friends had said it would be. But we had a specific objective in mind. Not the cathedral, to which our Michelin guidebook accorded one star. Not even the traditional bustling marketplace, which Hemingway might have immortalized in a couple of paragraphs. What we wanted, as we'd explained to our disbelieving friends, was something simpler.

We had come to Huesca for a cup of coffee.

My wife scanned the storefronts as I turned into unfamiliar streets. Twice I nearly stopped the car, but Minu's sense of occasion was not satisfied. "No, not here," she said. "It's not quite right." I drove on.
It was springtime, as it had been decades earlier, in 1937, when Huesca had acquired its brief spasm of importance as a military stronghold of Franco's army in the Spanish Civil War. The ragtag Republican forces, resisting him in their forlorn fight against fascism, had encircled the town. Their ranks included a motley collection of international volunteers-idealists and opportunists, anarchists, communists and passionate democrats. Amongst them was a gaunt, consumptive English writer who called himself George Orwell.
The Republicans, poorly armed, badly led, hopelessly organised and racked by treachery and dissension, besieged Huesca for months. Amidst the blood and grime of the gruelling campaign, the inspiriting word was passed through the frontlines: "Tomorrow we'll have coffee in Huesca."

Orwell took heart from the prospect. Like "we'll be home for Christmas" it was the kind of false promise that sustains morale in every war. The siege of Huesca dragged on, and the slogan's optimism rang increasingly hollow. Attrition took its toll on lives, strategic objectives, hope. Huesca, impregnable in fascist hands, seemed to represent the utter futility of the cause of freedom.

George Orwell, destined to be one of the world's great voices of freedom, was wounded in action on the outskirts of Huesca. He left for home on a stretcher, bitterly disappointed. "If I ever go back to Spain," he wrote in his searing Homage to Catalonia, "I shall make a point of having a cup of coffee in Huesca."
But Huesca did not fall. Franco and Fascism triumphed in Spain. Orwell never saw Huesca again.
"Here," Minu said abruptly. "This is it. Stop the car."

We were at a modest little cafe, as unremarkable as the ones she had earlier rejected. But across the road, its sign bright in the sun, stood an imposing building. For forty years under the Franco regime, the long arm of the law had ended in a clenched fist-that of the dreaded Guardia Civil. Minu had stopped me in front of its local headquarters. "What will you have, Señor, Señora?" the waiter asked us as we sat down. "Lunch? Dessert?"
I looked over his shoulder, across the road, at two civil guards in their uniform of newly-restored democracy. They stood stiffly at attention, rifles in hand, guarding the gates of their establishment.
"No, thanks," I replied at last. "All we need is a cup of coffee.

http://www.shashitharoor.com/articles/homageinhuesca.htm

Unitarian Jihad

WORLD POLICY JOURNAL

ARTICLE: Volume XVI, No4, WINTER 1999/2000

Are Human Rights Universal?
Shashi Tharoor

The growing consensus in the West that human rights are universal has been fiercely opposed by critics in other parts of the world. At the very least, the idea may well pose as many questions as it answers. Beyond the more general, philosophical question of whether anything in our pluri-cultural, multipolar world is truly universal, the issue of whether human rights is an essentially Western concept—ignoring the very different cultural, economic, and political realities of the other parts of the world—cannot simply be dismissed. Can the values of the consumer society be applied to societies that have nothing to consume? Isn't talking about universal rights rather like saying that the rich and the poor both have the same right to fly first class and to sleep under bridges? Don't human rights as laid out in the international covenants ignore the traditions, the religions, and the socio-cultural patterns of what used to be called the Third World? And at the risk of sounding frivolous, when you stop a man in traditional dress from beating his wife, are you upholding her human rights or violating his?

This is anything but an abstract debate. To the contrary, ours is an era in which wars have been waged in the name of human rights, and in which many of the major developments in international law have presupposed the universality of the concept. By the same token, the perception that human rights as a universal discourse is increasingly serving as a flag of convenience for other, far more questionable political agendas, accounts for the degree to which the very idea of human rights is being questioned and resisted by both intellectuals and states. These objections need to be taken very seriously.

The philosophical objection asserts essentially that nothing can be universal; that all rights and values are defined and limited by cultural perceptions. If there is no universal culture, there can be no universal human rights. In fact, some philosophers have objected that the concept of human rights is founded on an anthropocentric, that is, a human-centered, view of the world, predicated upon an individualistic view of man as an autonomous being whose greatest need is to be free from interference by the state—free to enjoy what one Western writer summed up as the “right to private property, the right to freedom of contract, and the right to be left alone.” But this view would seem to clash with the communitarian one propounded by other ideologies and cultures where society is conceived of as far more than the sum of its individual members.

Who Defines Human Rights?
Implicit in this is a series of broad, culturally grounded objections. Historically, in a number of non-Western cultures, individuals are not accorded rights in the same way as they are in the West. Critics of the universal idea of human rights contend that in the Confucian or Vedic traditions, duties are considered more important than rights, while in Africa it is the community that protects and nurtures the individual. One African writer summed up the African philosophy of existence as: “I am because we are, and because we are therefore I am.” Some Africans have argued that they have a complex structure of communal entitlements and obligations grouped around what one might call four “r's”: not “rights,” but respect, restraint, responsibility, and reciprocity. They argue that in most African societies group rights have always taken precedence over individual rights, and political decisions have been made through group consensus, not through individual assertions of rights.

These cultural differences, to the extent that they are real, have practical implications. Many in developing countries argue that some human rights are simply not relevant to their societies—the right, for instance, to political pluralism, the right to paid vacations (always good for a laugh in the sweatshops of the Third World), and, inevitably, the rights of women. It is not just that some societies claim they are simply unable to provide certain rights to all their citizens, but rather that they see the “universal” conception of human rights as little more than an attempt to impose alien Western values on them.

Rights promoting the equality of the sexes are a contentious case in point. How, critics demand, can women's rights be universal in the face of widespread divergences of cultural practice, when in many societies, for example, marriage is not seen as a contract between two individuals but as an alliance between lineages, and when the permissible behavior of womenfolk is central to the society's perception of its honor?

And, inseparable from the issues of tradition, is the issue of religion. For religious critics of the universalist definition of human rights, nothing can be universal that is not founded on transcendent values, symbolized by God, and sanctioned by the guardians of the various faiths. They point out that the cardinal document of the contemporary human rights movement, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, can claim no such heritage.

Recently, the fiftieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration was celebrated with much fanfare. But critics from countries that were still colonies in 1948 suggest that its provisions reflect the ethnocentric bias of the time. They go on to argue that the concept of human rights is really a cover for Western interventionism in the affairs of the developing world, and that “human rights” are merely an instrument of Western political neocolonialism. One critic in the 1970s wrote of his fear that “Human Rights might turn out to be a Trojan horse, surreptitiously introduced into other civilizations, which will then be obliged to accept those ways of living, thinking and feeling for which Human Rights is the proper solution in cases of conflict.”

In practice, this argument tends to be as much about development as about civilizational integrity. Critics argue that the developing countries often cannot afford human rights, since the tasks of nation building, economic development, and the consolidation of the state structure to these ends are still unfinished. Authoritarianism, they argue, is more efficient in promoting development and economic growth. This is the premise behind the so-called Asian values case, which attributes the economic growth of Southeast Asia to the Confucian virtues of obedience, order, and respect for authority. The argument is even a little more subtle than that, because the suspension or limiting of human rights is also portrayed as the sacrifice of the few for the benefit of the many. The human rights concept is understood, applied, and argued over only, critics say, by a small Westernized minority in developing countries. Universality in these circumstances would be the universality of the privileged. Human rights is for the few who have the concerns of Westerners; it does not extend to the lowest rungs of the ladder.

The Case for the Defense
That is the case for the prosecution—the indictment of the assumption of the universality of human rights. There is, of course, a case for the defense. The philosophical objection is, perhaps surprisingly, the easiest to counter. After all, concepts of justice and law, the legitimacy of government, the dignity of the individual, protection from oppressive or arbitrary rule, and participation in the affairs of the community are found in every society on the face of this earth. Far from being difficult to identify, the number of philosophical common denominators between different cultures and political traditions makes universalism anything but a distortion of reality.

Historically, a number of developing countries—notably India, China, Chile, Cuba, Lebanon, and Panama—played an active and highly influential part in the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In the case of the human rights covenants, in the 1960s the developing world actually made the decisive contribution; it was the “new majority” of the Third World states emerging from colonialism—particularly Ghana and Nigeria—that broke the logjam, ending the East-West stalemate that had held up adoption of the covenants for nearly two decades. The principles of human rights have been widely adopted, imitated, and ratified by developing countries; the fact that therefore they were devised by less than a third of the states now in existence is really irrelevant.

In reality, many of the current objections to the universality of human rights reflect a false opposition between the primacy of the individual and the paramountcy of society. Many of the civil and political rights protect groups, while many of the social and economic rights protect individuals. Thus, crucially, the two sets of rights, and the two covenants that codify them, are like Siamese twins—inseparable and interdependent, sustaining and nourishing each other.

Still, while the conflict between group rights and individual rights may not be inevitable, it would be naïve to pretend that conflict would never occur. But while groups may collectively exercise rights, the individuals within them should also be permitted the exercise of their rights within the group, rights that the group may not infringe upon.

A Hidden Agenda?
Those who champion the view that human rights are not universal frequently insist that their adversaries have hidden agendas. In fairness, the same accusation can be leveled against at least some of those who cite culture as a defense against human rights. Authoritarian regimes who appeal to their own cultural traditions are cheerfully willing to crush culture domestically when it suits them to do so. Also, the “traditional culture” that is sometimes advanced to justify the nonobservance of human rights, including in Africa, in practice no longer exists in a pure form at the national level anywhere. The societies of developing countries have not remained in a pristine, pre-Western state; all have been subject to change and distortion by external influence, both as a result of colonialism in many cases and through participation in modern interstate relations.

You cannot impose the model of a “modern” nation-state cutting across tribal boundaries and conventions on your country, appoint a president and an ambassador to the United Nations, and then argue that tribal traditions should be applied to judge the human rights conduct of the resulting modern state.

In any case, there should be nothing sacrosanct about culture. Culture is constantly evolving in any living society, responding to both internal and external stimuli, and there is much in every culture that societies quite naturally outgrow and reject. Am I, as an Indian, obliged to defend, in the name of my culture, the practice of suttee, which was banned 160 years ago, of obliging widows to immolate themselves on their husbands' funeral pyres? The fact that slavery was acceptable across the world for at least 2,000 years does not make it acceptable to us now; the deep historical roots of anti-Semitism in European culture cannot justify discrimination against Jews today.

The problem with the culture argument is that it subsumes all members of a society under a cultural framework that may in fact be inimical to them. It is one thing to advocate the cultural argument with an escape clause—that is, one that does not seek to coerce the dissenters but permits individuals to opt out and to assert their individual rights. Those who freely choose to live by and to be treated according to their traditional cultures are welcome to do so, provided others who wish to be free are not oppressed in the name of a culture they prefer to disavow.

A controversial but pertinent example of an approach that seeks to strengthen both cultural integrity and individual freedom is India's Muslim Women (Protection of Rights upon Divorce) Act. This piece of legislation was enacted following the famous Shah Banu case, in which the Supreme Court upheld the right of a divorced Muslim woman to alimony, prompting howls of outrage from Muslim traditionalists who claimed this violated their religious beliefs that divorced women were only entitled to the return of the bride price paid upon marriage. The Indian parliament then passed a law to override the court's judgment, under which Muslim women married under Muslim law would be obliged to accept the return of the bride price as the only payment of alimony, but that the official Muslim charity, the Waqf Board, would assist them.

Many Muslim women and feminists were outraged by this. But the interesting point is that if a Muslim woman does not want to be subject to the provisions of the act, she can marry under the civil code; if she marries under Muslim personal law, she will be subject to its provisions. That may be the kind of balance that can be struck between the rights of Muslims as a group to protect their traditional practices and the right of a particular Muslim woman, who may not choose to be subject to that particular law, to exempt herself from it.

It needs to be emphasized that the objections that are voiced to specific (allegedly Western) rights very frequently involve the rights of women, and are usually vociferously argued by men. Even conceding, for argument's sake, that child marriage, widow inheritance, female circumcision, and the like are not found reprehensible by many societies, how do the victims of these practices feel about them? How many teenage girls who have had their genitalia mutilated would have agreed to undergo circumcision if they had the human right to refuse to permit it? For me, the standard is simple: where coercion exists, rights are violated, and these violations must be condemned whatever the traditional justification. So it is not culture that is the test, it is coercion.

Not with Faith, But with the Faithful
Nor can religion be deployed to sanction the status quo. Every religion seeks to embody certain verities that are applicable to all mankind—justice, truth, mercy, compassion—though the details of their interpretation vary according to the historical and geographical context in which the religion originated. As U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan has often said, the problem is usually not with the faith, but with the faithful. In any case, freedom is not a value found only in Western faiths: it is highly prized in Buddhism and in different aspects of Hinduism and Islam.

If religion cannot be fairly used to sanction oppression, it should be equally obvious that authoritarianism promotes repression, not development. Development is about change, but repression prevents change. The Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen has pointed out in a number of interesting pieces that there is now a generally agreed-upon list of policies that are helpful to economic development—“openness to competition, the use of international markets, a high level of literacy and school education, successful land reforms, and public provision of incentives for investment, export and industrialization”—none of which requires authoritarianism; none is incompatible with human rights. Indeed, it is the availability of political and civil rights that gives people the opportunity to draw attention to their needs and to demand action from the government. Sen's work has established, for example, that no substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent and democratic country with a relatively free press. That is striking; though there may be cases where authoritarian societies have had success in achieving economic growth, a country like Botswana, an exemplar of democracy in Africa, has grown faster than most authoritarian states.

In any case, when one hears of the unsuitability or inapplicability or ethnocentrism of human rights, it is important to ask what the unstated assumptions of this view really are. What exactly are these human rights that it is so unreasonable to promote? If one picks up the more contentious covenant—the one on civil and political rights—and looks through the list, what can one find that someone in a developing country can easily do without? Not the right to life, one trusts. Freedom from torture? The right not to be enslaved, not to be physically assaulted, not to be arbitrarily arrested, imprisoned, executed? No one actually advocates in so many words the abridgement of any of these rights. As Kofi Annan asked at a speech in Tehran University in 1997: “When have you heard a free voice demand an end to freedom? Where have you heard a slave argue for slavery? When have you heard a victim of torture endorse the ways of the torturer? Where have you heard the tolerant cry out for intolerance?”

Tolerance and mercy have always, and in all cultures, been ideals of government rule and human behavior. If we do not unequivocally assert the universality of the rights that oppressive governments abuse, and if we admit that these rights can be diluted and changed, ultimately we risk giving oppressive governments an intellectual justification for the morally indefensible. Objections to the applicability of international human rights standards have all too frequently been voiced by authoritarian rulers and power elites to rationalize their violations of human rights—violations that serve primarily, if not solely, to sustain them in power. Just as the Devil can quote scripture for his purpose, Third World communitarianism can be the slogan of a deracinated tyrant trained, as in the case of Pol Pot, at the Sorbonne. The authentic voices of the Third World know how to cry out in pain. It is time to heed them.

The “Right to Development”
At the same time, particularly in a world in which market capitalism is triumphant, it is important to stress that the right to development is also a universal human right. The very concept of development evolved in tune with the concept of human rights; decolonization and self-determination advanced side by side with a consciousness of the need to improve the standards of living of subject peoples. The idea that human rights could be ensured merely by the state not interfering with individual freedom cannot survive confrontation with a billion hungry, deprived, illiterate, and jobless human beings around the globe. Human rights, in one memorable phrase, start with breakfast.

For the sake of the deprived, the notion of human rights has to be a positive, active one: not just protection from the state but also the protection of the state, to permit these human beings to fulfill the basic aspirations of growth and development that are frustrated by poverty and scarce resources. We have to accept that social deprivation and economic exploitation are just as evil as political oppression or racial persecution. This calls for a more profound approach to both human rights and to development. Without development, human rights could not be truly universal, since universality must be predicated upon the most underprivileged in developing countries achieving empowerment. We can not exclude the poorest of the poor from the universality of the rich.

After all, do some societies have the right to deny human beings the opportunity to fulfill their aspirations for growth and fulfillment legally and in freedom, while other societies organize themselves in such a way as to permit and encourage human beings freely to fulfill the same needs? On what basis can we accept a double standard that says that an Australian's need to develop his own potential is a right, while an Angolan's or an Albanian's is a luxury?

Universality, Not Uniformity
But it is essential to recognize that universality does not presuppose uniformity. To assert the universality of human rights is not to suggest that our views of human rights transcend all possible philosophical, cultural, or religious differences or represent a magical aggregation of the world's ethical and philosophical systems. Rather, it is enough that they do not fundamentally contradict the ideals and aspirations of any society, and that they reflect our common universal humanity, from which no human being must be excluded.

Most basically, human rights derive from the mere fact of being human; they are not the gift of a particular government or legal code. But the standards being proclaimed internationally can become reality only when applied by countries within their own legal systems. The challenge is to work towards the “indigenization” of human rights, and their assertion within each country's traditions and history. If different approaches are welcomed within the established framework—if, in other words, eclecticism can be encouraged as part of the consensus and not be seen as a threat to it—this flexibility can guarantee universality, enrich the intellectual and philosophical debate, and so complement, rather than undermine, the concept of worldwide human rights. Paradoxical as it may seem, it is a universal idea of human rights that can in fact help make the world safe for diversity.

Note
This article was adapted from the first Mahbub-ul-Haq Memorial Lecture, South Asia Forum, October 1998.

http://www.worldpolicy.org/journal/tharoor.html

Are Human Rights Universal?

WORLD POLICY JOURNAL

ARTICLE: Volume XVI, No4, WINTER 1999/2000

Are Human Rights Universal?
Shashi Tharoor

The growing consensus in the West that human rights are universal has been fiercely opposed by critics in other parts of the world. At the very least, the idea may well pose as many questions as it answers. Beyond the more general, philosophical question of whether anything in our pluri-cultural, multipolar world is truly universal, the issue of whether human rights is an essentially Western concept—ignoring the very different cultural, economic, and political realities of the other parts of the world—cannot simply be dismissed. Can the values of the consumer society be applied to societies that have nothing to consume? Isn't talking about universal rights rather like saying that the rich and the poor both have the same right to fly first class and to sleep under bridges? Don't human rights as laid out in the international covenants ignore the traditions, the religions, and the socio-cultural patterns of what used to be called the Third World? And at the risk of sounding frivolous, when you stop a man in traditional dress from beating his wife, are you upholding her human rights or violating his?

This is anything but an abstract debate. To the contrary, ours is an era in which wars have been waged in the name of human rights, and in which many of the major developments in international law have presupposed the universality of the concept. By the same token, the perception that human rights as a universal discourse is increasingly serving as a flag of convenience for other, far more questionable political agendas, accounts for the degree to which the very idea of human rights is being questioned and resisted by both intellectuals and states. These objections need to be taken very seriously.

The philosophical objection asserts essentially that nothing can be universal; that all rights and values are defined and limited by cultural perceptions. If there is no universal culture, there can be no universal human rights. In fact, some philosophers have objected that the concept of human rights is founded on an anthropocentric, that is, a human-centered, view of the world, predicated upon an individualistic view of man as an autonomous being whose greatest need is to be free from interference by the state—free to enjoy what one Western writer summed up as the “right to private property, the right to freedom of contract, and the right to be left alone.” But this view would seem to clash with the communitarian one propounded by other ideologies and cultures where society is conceived of as far more than the sum of its individual members.

Who Defines Human Rights?
Implicit in this is a series of broad, culturally grounded objections. Historically, in a number of non-Western cultures, individuals are not accorded rights in the same way as they are in the West. Critics of the universal idea of human rights contend that in the Confucian or Vedic traditions, duties are considered more important than rights, while in Africa it is the community that protects and nurtures the individual. One African writer summed up the African philosophy of existence as: “I am because we are, and because we are therefore I am.” Some Africans have argued that they have a complex structure of communal entitlements and obligations grouped around what one might call four “r's”: not “rights,” but respect, restraint, responsibility, and reciprocity. They argue that in most African societies group rights have always taken precedence over individual rights, and political decisions have been made through group consensus, not through individual assertions of rights.

These cultural differences, to the extent that they are real, have practical implications. Many in developing countries argue that some human rights are simply not relevant to their societies—the right, for instance, to political pluralism, the right to paid vacations (always good for a laugh in the sweatshops of the Third World), and, inevitably, the rights of women. It is not just that some societies claim they are simply unable to provide certain rights to all their citizens, but rather that they see the “universal” conception of human rights as little more than an attempt to impose alien Western values on them.

Rights promoting the equality of the sexes are a contentious case in point. How, critics demand, can women's rights be universal in the face of widespread divergences of cultural practice, when in many societies, for example, marriage is not seen as a contract between two individuals but as an alliance between lineages, and when the permissible behavior of womenfolk is central to the society's perception of its honor?

And, inseparable from the issues of tradition, is the issue of religion. For religious critics of the universalist definition of human rights, nothing can be universal that is not founded on transcendent values, symbolized by God, and sanctioned by the guardians of the various faiths. They point out that the cardinal document of the contemporary human rights movement, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, can claim no such heritage.

Recently, the fiftieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration was celebrated with much fanfare. But critics from countries that were still colonies in 1948 suggest that its provisions reflect the ethnocentric bias of the time. They go on to argue that the concept of human rights is really a cover for Western interventionism in the affairs of the developing world, and that “human rights” are merely an instrument of Western political neocolonialism. One critic in the 1970s wrote of his fear that “Human Rights might turn out to be a Trojan horse, surreptitiously introduced into other civilizations, which will then be obliged to accept those ways of living, thinking and feeling for which Human Rights is the proper solution in cases of conflict.”

In practice, this argument tends to be as much about development as about civilizational integrity. Critics argue that the developing countries often cannot afford human rights, since the tasks of nation building, economic development, and the consolidation of the state structure to these ends are still unfinished. Authoritarianism, they argue, is more efficient in promoting development and economic growth. This is the premise behind the so-called Asian values case, which attributes the economic growth of Southeast Asia to the Confucian virtues of obedience, order, and respect for authority. The argument is even a little more subtle than that, because the suspension or limiting of human rights is also portrayed as the sacrifice of the few for the benefit of the many. The human rights concept is understood, applied, and argued over only, critics say, by a small Westernized minority in developing countries. Universality in these circumstances would be the universality of the privileged. Human rights is for the few who have the concerns of Westerners; it does not extend to the lowest rungs of the ladder.

The Case for the Defense
That is the case for the prosecution—the indictment of the assumption of the universality of human rights. There is, of course, a case for the defense. The philosophical objection is, perhaps surprisingly, the easiest to counter. After all, concepts of justice and law, the legitimacy of government, the dignity of the individual, protection from oppressive or arbitrary rule, and participation in the affairs of the community are found in every society on the face of this earth. Far from being difficult to identify, the number of philosophical common denominators between different cultures and political traditions makes universalism anything but a distortion of reality.

Historically, a number of developing countries—notably India, China, Chile, Cuba, Lebanon, and Panama—played an active and highly influential part in the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In the case of the human rights covenants, in the 1960s the developing world actually made the decisive contribution; it was the “new majority” of the Third World states emerging from colonialism—particularly Ghana and Nigeria—that broke the logjam, ending the East-West stalemate that had held up adoption of the covenants for nearly two decades. The principles of human rights have been widely adopted, imitated, and ratified by developing countries; the fact that therefore they were devised by less than a third of the states now in existence is really irrelevant.

In reality, many of the current objections to the universality of human rights reflect a false opposition between the primacy of the individual and the paramountcy of society. Many of the civil and political rights protect groups, while many of the social and economic rights protect individuals. Thus, crucially, the two sets of rights, and the two covenants that codify them, are like Siamese twins—inseparable and interdependent, sustaining and nourishing each other.

Still, while the conflict between group rights and individual rights may not be inevitable, it would be naïve to pretend that conflict would never occur. But while groups may collectively exercise rights, the individuals within them should also be permitted the exercise of their rights within the group, rights that the group may not infringe upon.

A Hidden Agenda?
Those who champion the view that human rights are not universal frequently insist that their adversaries have hidden agendas. In fairness, the same accusation can be leveled against at least some of those who cite culture as a defense against human rights. Authoritarian regimes who appeal to their own cultural traditions are cheerfully willing to crush culture domestically when it suits them to do so. Also, the “traditional culture” that is sometimes advanced to justify the nonobservance of human rights, including in Africa, in practice no longer exists in a pure form at the national level anywhere. The societies of developing countries have not remained in a pristine, pre-Western state; all have been subject to change and distortion by external influence, both as a result of colonialism in many cases and through participation in modern interstate relations.

You cannot impose the model of a “modern” nation-state cutting across tribal boundaries and conventions on your country, appoint a president and an ambassador to the United Nations, and then argue that tribal traditions should be applied to judge the human rights conduct of the resulting modern state.

In any case, there should be nothing sacrosanct about culture. Culture is constantly evolving in any living society, responding to both internal and external stimuli, and there is much in every culture that societies quite naturally outgrow and reject. Am I, as an Indian, obliged to defend, in the name of my culture, the practice of suttee, which was banned 160 years ago, of obliging widows to immolate themselves on their husbands' funeral pyres? The fact that slavery was acceptable across the world for at least 2,000 years does not make it acceptable to us now; the deep historical roots of anti-Semitism in European culture cannot justify discrimination against Jews today.

The problem with the culture argument is that it subsumes all members of a society under a cultural framework that may in fact be inimical to them. It is one thing to advocate the cultural argument with an escape clause—that is, one that does not seek to coerce the dissenters but permits individuals to opt out and to assert their individual rights. Those who freely choose to live by and to be treated according to their traditional cultures are welcome to do so, provided others who wish to be free are not oppressed in the name of a culture they prefer to disavow.

A controversial but pertinent example of an approach that seeks to strengthen both cultural integrity and individual freedom is India's Muslim Women (Protection of Rights upon Divorce) Act. This piece of legislation was enacted following the famous Shah Banu case, in which the Supreme Court upheld the right of a divorced Muslim woman to alimony, prompting howls of outrage from Muslim traditionalists who claimed this violated their religious beliefs that divorced women were only entitled to the return of the bride price paid upon marriage. The Indian parliament then passed a law to override the court's judgment, under which Muslim women married under Muslim law would be obliged to accept the return of the bride price as the only payment of alimony, but that the official Muslim charity, the Waqf Board, would assist them.

Many Muslim women and feminists were outraged by this. But the interesting point is that if a Muslim woman does not want to be subject to the provisions of the act, she can marry under the civil code; if she marries under Muslim personal law, she will be subject to its provisions. That may be the kind of balance that can be struck between the rights of Muslims as a group to protect their traditional practices and the right of a particular Muslim woman, who may not choose to be subject to that particular law, to exempt herself from it.

It needs to be emphasized that the objections that are voiced to specific (allegedly Western) rights very frequently involve the rights of women, and are usually vociferously argued by men. Even conceding, for argument's sake, that child marriage, widow inheritance, female circumcision, and the like are not found reprehensible by many societies, how do the victims of these practices feel about them? How many teenage girls who have had their genitalia mutilated would have agreed to undergo circumcision if they had the human right to refuse to permit it? For me, the standard is simple: where coercion exists, rights are violated, and these violations must be condemned whatever the traditional justification. So it is not culture that is the test, it is coercion.

Not with Faith, But with the Faithful
Nor can religion be deployed to sanction the status quo. Every religion seeks to embody certain verities that are applicable to all mankind—justice, truth, mercy, compassion—though the details of their interpretation vary according to the historical and geographical context in which the religion originated. As U.N. secretary general Kofi Annan has often said, the problem is usually not with the faith, but with the faithful. In any case, freedom is not a value found only in Western faiths: it is highly prized in Buddhism and in different aspects of Hinduism and Islam.

If religion cannot be fairly used to sanction oppression, it should be equally obvious that authoritarianism promotes repression, not development. Development is about change, but repression prevents change. The Nobel Prize–winning economist Amartya Sen has pointed out in a number of interesting pieces that there is now a generally agreed-upon list of policies that are helpful to economic development—“openness to competition, the use of international markets, a high level of literacy and school education, successful land reforms, and public provision of incentives for investment, export and industrialization”—none of which requires authoritarianism; none is incompatible with human rights. Indeed, it is the availability of political and civil rights that gives people the opportunity to draw attention to their needs and to demand action from the government. Sen's work has established, for example, that no substantial famine has ever occurred in any independent and democratic country with a relatively free press. That is striking; though there may be cases where authoritarian societies have had success in achieving economic growth, a country like Botswana, an exemplar of democracy in Africa, has grown faster than most authoritarian states.

In any case, when one hears of the unsuitability or inapplicability or ethnocentrism of human rights, it is important to ask what the unstated assumptions of this view really are. What exactly are these human rights that it is so unreasonable to promote? If one picks up the more contentious covenant—the one on civil and political rights—and looks through the list, what can one find that someone in a developing country can easily do without? Not the right to life, one trusts. Freedom from torture? The right not to be enslaved, not to be physically assaulted, not to be arbitrarily arrested, imprisoned, executed? No one actually advocates in so many words the abridgement of any of these rights. As Kofi Annan asked at a speech in Tehran University in 1997: “When have you heard a free voice demand an end to freedom? Where have you heard a slave argue for slavery? When have you heard a victim of torture endorse the ways of the torturer? Where have you heard the tolerant cry out for intolerance?”

Tolerance and mercy have always, and in all cultures, been ideals of government rule and human behavior. If we do not unequivocally assert the universality of the rights that oppressive governments abuse, and if we admit that these rights can be diluted and changed, ultimately we risk giving oppressive governments an intellectual justification for the morally indefensible. Objections to the applicability of international human rights standards have all too frequently been voiced by authoritarian rulers and power elites to rationalize their violations of human rights—violations that serve primarily, if not solely, to sustain them in power. Just as the Devil can quote scripture for his purpose, Third World communitarianism can be the slogan of a deracinated tyrant trained, as in the case of Pol Pot, at the Sorbonne. The authentic voices of the Third World know how to cry out in pain. It is time to heed them.

The “Right to Development”
At the same time, particularly in a world in which market capitalism is triumphant, it is important to stress that the right to development is also a universal human right. The very concept of development evolved in tune with the concept of human rights; decolonization and self-determination advanced side by side with a consciousness of the need to improve the standards of living of subject peoples. The idea that human rights could be ensured merely by the state not interfering with individual freedom cannot survive confrontation with a billion hungry, deprived, illiterate, and jobless human beings around the globe. Human rights, in one memorable phrase, start with breakfast.

For the sake of the deprived, the notion of human rights has to be a positive, active one: not just protection from the state but also the protection of the state, to permit these human beings to fulfill the basic aspirations of growth and development that are frustrated by poverty and scarce resources. We have to accept that social deprivation and economic exploitation are just as evil as political oppression or racial persecution. This calls for a more profound approach to both human rights and to development. Without development, human rights could not be truly universal, since universality must be predicated upon the most underprivileged in developing countries achieving empowerment. We can not exclude the poorest of the poor from the universality of the rich.

After all, do some societies have the right to deny human beings the opportunity to fulfill their aspirations for growth and fulfillment legally and in freedom, while other societies organize themselves in such a way as to permit and encourage human beings freely to fulfill the same needs? On what basis can we accept a double standard that says that an Australian's need to develop his own potential is a right, while an Angolan's or an Albanian's is a luxury?

Universality, Not Uniformity
But it is essential to recognize that universality does not presuppose uniformity. To assert the universality of human rights is not to suggest that our views of human rights transcend all possible philosophical, cultural, or religious differences or represent a magical aggregation of the world's ethical and philosophical systems. Rather, it is enough that they do not fundamentally contradict the ideals and aspirations of any society, and that they reflect our common universal humanity, from which no human being must be excluded.

Most basically, human rights derive from the mere fact of being human; they are not the gift of a particular government or legal code. But the standards being proclaimed internationally can become reality only when applied by countries within their own legal systems. The challenge is to work towards the “indigenization” of human rights, and their assertion within each country's traditions and history. If different approaches are welcomed within the established framework—if, in other words, eclecticism can be encouraged as part of the consensus and not be seen as a threat to it—this flexibility can guarantee universality, enrich the intellectual and philosophical debate, and so complement, rather than undermine, the concept of worldwide human rights. Paradoxical as it may seem, it is a universal idea of human rights that can in fact help make the world safe for diversity.

Note
This article was adapted from the first Mahbub-ul-Haq Memorial Lecture, South Asia Forum, October 1998.

http://www.worldpolicy.org/journal/tharoor.html

A Dehli Story

http://www.ranadasgupta.com/texts.asp

A Delhi story More texts


A Delhi story
Fiction : Delhi, satire
Friday, November 04, 2005 03:37 GMT


You go into the guy's attic. He's shown you the rest of the house: he's proud of what he's done in life. A Sonata each for him and his wife and a little Skoda for his daughter. (Soon to be shown. The daughter, that is.) This enormous house in GK1 which you can't argue with; no one can say: "This guy hasn't made it. This guy's tried but he hasn't got there." No: this pile got rooms beyond rooms and additions and features brought from everywhere on the planet, and a kidney-shaped swimming pool and, above all, Pillars. So he's shown you everything - the Danish bathrooms and the inlaid floor and the pool room, and it's been a long day of sun and cocktails and celebrity tales: you're a little dazed and the other guests are a little Over with the tour - and finally you all arrive in the attic. Gleaming floors and gold trim and powdery hidden lighting. And the whole marble tennis court size of it full of Ganesh statues. Like: one hundred. All identical: eight foot high, crammed in, trunks life size, no space to move for bronze arms and pudgy crossed feet. It's certainly a sight but the guy is not elucidating. Someone asks, you know, Why - er - so many? The statues, that is. Why you need - so many?

The guy been waiting for this. The story is better on the end of a question. So he tells it. Goes like this.

Seems he was driving back from Agra with the family stops in this craft warehouse. You know: roadside place, middle of nowhere, dusty patch in front where cars draw up with a couple shrivelled champa trees and a stand sells paranthas with a few red plastic chairs all around. But the craft place is the real draw: vast place with road signs every mile along the highway. Our man walks in, Mont Blanc in the shirt pocket, little touch makes people understand. The door closes on the hot sun and eyes take a bit of time to adjust. His wife and daughter behind, looking politely at coffee tables and lamps. He looks for more manly things, wiping his damp neck with a generous handkerchief. There's a statue of Ganesh, big one, his kind of scale. "How much?" he says with accustomed nonchalance.

The guy is evasive, embarassed - as if for Him. "You can't afford it," he says eventually. "It's very expensive. We have smaller ones."

What can you say?

Our man is astonished. Outrage. Fury. Apoplexy. Rage too big to find an outlet.

Mont Blanc quivers a bit: in front of his wife he is spoken to like that! In front of his Daughter, for whom daddy is and always must be infinite! There is an outburst, and a thwack on the sweaty behind of the balding head of the ageing manager of this roadside emporium. Vulgarities are shouted, shining pressed linen is distressed, and sunglasses (Versace, JFK duty free) are brandished. Feet, even, are stamped, and the manager's lapel firmly held while eyes look into eyes. And as glare dominates whimper, the volume gradually decreases as our man finds his focus, his purpose, his victory over the situation.

"How many do you have? Where do you keep them?" he says menacingly. "I want you to pack every last one for me. Too expensive? I'll show you too expensive, you - "

And there are more vulgarities.

The warehouse is extensive. There are one hundred and thirteen other statues identical to the one he has seen. Our man will not depart until he has personally supervised the wrapping of each one. The process is lengthy - even when extra men are brought to help (and the roadside tea stall and paan stall stand temporarily unmanned). Wife flutters between anger and pride and rumbling stomach and all the reasons she has to be back in Delhi - Now. Daughter begins by making a stand - you can't do this, drop it, OK I'm leaving, I'll take a taxi - but the father wants everyone to be his witness, and she sits and sends text messages of shame and humiliation to her friends. Finally the deed is done, and one hundred and fourteen startled gods are lugged into the daylight and stood, teetering in the back of six churning, revving trucks. The Visa card is brandished, lightly, but with clear vindictive triumph. The amount is absurd, far more than the cost of the glinting Sonata into whose air conditioning he now victoriously retreats; but Principles, my darlings, are Principles.

He is cock-a-hoop on the highway. "Never speak like that to me again, he won't. I fucked him proper. Yes - no my dear that is the only word to describe the situation. He was fucked. Did you see his face? A man fucked." He bangs the steering wheel with the exaltation of it all. "Too expensive, he says. Too expensive. He has no idea. Fucked." All the way to the Qutub Minar, passing the trucks on the way, slow with their burden of bronze divinities, and all the way to the appropriately named Greater Kailash (Part 1), leafy and peaceful, and still insensible to its imminent influx of fresh gods.

Of the manager of the craft emporium, and his opinion of these occurrences, we have, of course, no idea. We cannot know if he has changed his ways - if this shocking set of events has dissuaded him from speaking to his customers in this rude and disrespectful way.