at a time when big budget films like “atonement” (dizzyingly beautiful cinematography but story-wise much ado about nothing) and “3.10 to yuma” (beautiful wide-lens cinematography but flimsy storyline steadily crumbling into a sad pile of film debris) are making the oscar rounds, it’s good to partake of a film like “away from her”. there is a quiet elegance to this film, a spareness which is not thrust upon you like so many musical scores with too many notes, or a series of impeccably-constructed sets that demand your attention, or clever camera angles that take themselves too seriously. julie christie’s performance is radiant. the dialogue is economical, intelligent. the film’s structure is both skillful and assured. this is the kind of filmmaking i like - terse, nuanced, quiet, poetic, perfect. here is a trailer:

i have often said that american society’s primary goal seems to be to produce good consumers rather than good citizens. my friend susan sent me this terrific video that explains it all…

click on the image below to check it out:

we had dinner at a nice restaurant that offered a fusion of french-southeast asian cuisine. it could have been any nice restaurant in nyc (no mexican angle) but the food was good especially the sate and the delicately flavored shots of creme brulee that came in a friendly trio. after some down-time at our cousin’s apartment we were off to the hotel. the next day the kids registered for the sheratoons (the local kids club) and made some awful smelling cookies. they also swam and took it easy.

we decided to go to the city for lunch and thought the local bus would be an adventure for the kids. we got tickets and even though kids tickets were half the price, the driver charged us full price. i didn’t care much. we told the driver we wanted to get off in the center of town - centro - that was one of the bus’s regular stops. when we got to the city and tried to get off, the driver wouldn’t let us leave. thrice we tried to disembark but he told us to stay put - he knew where we had to get off. my husband trusted him. i was more suspicious. the city of puerto vallarta is tiny (just a couple of main streets) and it was obvious that we were out of the city now. the bus began to climb a hill. it turned a corner and there we were, bang in the middle of pv’s slums. there were no cabs here, no tall american tourists with flashy sunglasses, no shops crammed with talavera pottery or huichol art. this was the ghetto outside of puerto vallarta and well-meaning tourists are not supposed to see it. there were fewer and fewer people in the bus and i began to panic. i didn’t want to go wherever this guy was taking us. maybe we should just get off anywhere. but how would we get back? finally, after an hour of chugging along, we reached the end of the bus route. the bus driver asked my husband to pay for tickets if we wanted to get back to the city. so that’s what it was all about! i was furious. i refused to pay. my husband tried to explain in spanish but the driver insisted. “non comprende” was the way to end the argument and so it was that we were finally dropped off in downtown pv.

one night, after a day of shopping for pottery and rugs, we had dinner at our cousin’s apartment. her friends, pierre and hillary, were excellent company. pierre made some delicious cioppino with fresh fish and shrimp. cioppino is supposed to be san francisco’s answer to bouillabaisse and since our cousin and her friends are all from the west coast, it figured. the kids had a relaxed evening - lazing around, watching tv, and eating fire-roasted chicken, avocados, and french bread dipped in cioppino, with mango ice cream and guavas for dessert. it was a lovely evening.

we ate out on our last day at a mexican (mariachi and all) restaurant. i had some chicken mole. although the mole sauce was dark and rich and delicious the chicken was hard to tackle. it looked like pv was gearing up for new year’s eve but we were off early next morning, back to rochester and some mind-numbing below zero weather. mexico had been one helluva holiday!

our stay in chacala was fabulous - it was the real thing. fewer tourists, more interaction with local people, excellent food. there was a certain simplicity and charm to it. initially we had planned on staying at mare de jade, a beautiful retreat that offers both accomodation and meals. when that didn’t work out i began to look on the web. i found a blog called “mylifeinchacala“, a treasure trove of facts and information, with colorful pictures and personal recommendations. it was written by an american woman called andee carlsson. i emailed andee a couple of times and finally decided on casa monarca - i had read about it and seen the pictures on her blog.

while writing my posts about mexico, i went back to andee’s blog. the first thing i saw was a picture of her. i scrolled down, more pictures. i was surprised. having navigated andee’s blog in quite some detail while deciding on a place to stay, i had noticed how there were no pictures of her anywhere. i even tried to imagine what she looked like.

as i read on, i was shocked to find a post by her son, saying that andee had passed away on jan 16. we were in chacala last december and i had regretted not having had time to seek andee out and say hello. i guess that was not to be. even though i never met her, i was touched by andee’s sweetness and i just wanted to acknowledge that.

rest in peace andee, under chacala’s beautiful blue sky.

our first morning in chacala we went to the beach for breakfast and then on to the local market, video camera in hand. my son was my guide throughout this trip and did a wonderful job of navigating mexico complete with fun-facts and witty commentary. our first stop was a small souvenir shop where the guide in question purchased some flip flops. i had suggested as much while packing for the trip back in rochester, but mr middle school didn’t want to wear flip flops. we had settled on water shoes, luckily at hand from our lake house. however, in his haste to return to his psp, mr middle school had picked out 2 left shoes from the bunch - one was his own and one was his dad’s. since it is never advisable to have a guide with 2 left feet we decided to take care of that first.

we just strolled down the tiny bazaar. i bought some pottery. we tried authentic burritos, made on a stainless steel surface. they were good but would have been better if we had been allowed to try the sauces - my husband was at it again, making sure we only ate things that were steaming hot. after lunch we took it easy at casa monarca. my daughter spent several hours intermittently swimming in the pool and swinging in a hammock.

i had read on the web that chacala is always in need of school supplies, so i brought a bagful of school supplies and toys with me. kate told me to take them to mary ann day, co-founder of cambiando vidas (”changing lives”), a non-profit that provides academic support and social enrichment to the chacala community through a learning center, scholarships, computers and internet access, etc. mary ann lives on the top floor of casa aurora. my husband and i decided to walk there. we chatted with mary ann for quite a bit. she told us about the building boom beginning to take root in chacala, thanks to american developers looking to capitalize on chacala’s beach front potential. many of the bigger houses she told us belonged to americans. “i told the local people not to sell their land. i told them the gringos were coming - i ought to know, i’m a gringa!”. it will be a shame if chacala’s present way of life gets lost in the gated, shiny and greedy commerciality of big-ass hotel chains and resorts. mary ann believes it’s only a matter of time.

after some savory dinner (shrimp cooked with chunks of garlic - it had a definite kick) we got back home and began to pack up for our trip back to puerto vallarta the following day. i made the unpleasant acquaintance of a tiny gecko inside our house. it reminded me of pakistani lizards and i wasn’t too happy. thank god my husband is not afraid of anything and he took it out for me. the kids were very concerned for the gecko’s safety so the extradition process was a delicate affair.

we left for pv on thursday, which was perfect. thursday is farmers market day. en route we stopped at la penita mercado. what fun! the market was swarming with sellers. there were rugs, jewelry, pottery, wall hangings, paintings, and lots of fresh produce. i shopped to my heart’s content, trying to keep track of how much i would be able to squeeze into our suitcases. after the mercado we drove to pv, returned the car and took a cab to our hotel - the sheraton. my kids were visibly relieved by the sheer size and shininess of our new abode. the view from our room was stunning. the hotel was literally on the beach, just footsteps away from the sea. after escaping the hotel personnel (they were bent on making us all kinds of rich offers if we agreed to give them 1 1/2 hour of our vacation time to check out the hotel’s rental property) we had an excellent lunch at one of the many restaurants located within the resort. the kids were off on an explore. my son was soon remarkably well-versed in everything that had to do with the hotel - he had the lowdown on the sheraton.

later that evening, my husband’s cousin arrived. she was the reason we had made this trip. a frequent traveler to mexico and especially to pv, she was going to take us to town. we got into a cab and went to the apartment she had rented along with some friends. the apartment was built on top of a hill and looked deceptively like a big villa. it was in fact an entire building full of apartments that sprawled vertically along the slope of the hill and provided amazing views of the city at many different levels. the interior was beautifully decorated and replete with mexican craftwork. we were now ready to walk down the steps from the apartment, to the city of puerto vallarta!

we went to mexico over christmas break 2007 and what a terrific vacation that was! the weather was perfect, the food was flavorful (and quite different from the rather tepid fare passed off as mexican at most american restaurants), the people were friendly, and the places we visited were lovely.

we landed in puerto vallarta a little after 1pm and rented a car to drive about 1 1/2 hour north to chacala, a small fishing village. just take highway 200 in the direction of tepic. we stopped at rincon de guayabitos for some lunch and found this sleepy seaside town to be charming. we ate at this small family-run restaurant where the owner sat comfortably under the shade of a colorful awning, playing cards with her friends. it looked like she had spent a good part of her day doing just that. the food was delicious but it took the longest time for it to get prepared. it was obvious that our american-style dependence on time and efficiency, units of work produced per unit of time, would look embarrassing here. it’s better to go with the flow and enjoy each languorous moment of the day.

after following a long dirt road into chacala we finally got to kate’s house, casa monarca. kate is american, her husband is mexican. they have just finished building this beautiful house in chacala - tangerine-colored stucco, a pool with shimmering spheres of mediterranean blue, friendly hammocks and colorful wicker rocking chairs. it was a feast for the eyes. the family lives upstairs and rents the lower portion of the house. after settling down a bit we decided to walk to the beach and get some dinner. the most tourist friendly restaurant with the most extensive menu is the one with all the flags on it. it sits right on the beach. but instead of eating at the restaurant we decided to try a pineapple from a little fruit stand. it was an elaborate affair.

the top of the pineapple comes off first, before the fruit is cored. the core is moved to a small bowl filled with grenadine. the inside of the pineapple is then scraped and grated so as to make it drinkable. fresh lemon juice is squeezed into it and so is fresh orange juice. sea salt and chili powder are carefully stirred into the concoction. finally the fruit’s core is replaced into its center along with cucumber and orange slices. it’s a thing of beauty and perhaps the best tasting treat i had in mexico. my husband, the doctor, was praying that the chef and sous chef had duly washed their hands before embarking on this culinary project. all i can say is that it was well worth the risk! after this tasty and unconventional dinner we lingered on at the beach and experienced a stunning sunset. for the first time in months, i felt completely relaxed and carefree.

on jan 10, 2008, my rough cut was screened as a new york women in film and television event, at my house. there was food and drink and a good showing of people - mostly filmmakers and some friends. we watched the film in my basement and afterwards there was some time for comments and feedback. the response was tremendous. many in the audience said that they had learned a lot during this one hour screening. others appreciated the artistic elements in the film - the lahore collage and the bucolic scenes and artsy cafes depictive of rochester and its environs. all in all, for me as the filmmaker, it was a much heartening experience. some of the suggestions that were made were good and put me in the right frame of mind to complete my final edit. after this it’s more cleaning up by my assistant editor, the addition of some animation, the finalization and re-recording of my narration, the completion and inter-cutting of an original musical score, copyright issues, and then the final professional polishing. so much to do and very little time. goal: submit documentary to highfalls film festival jury by mid february. just gotta keep slogging away at it - i’m almost there!

we were in puerto vallarta, in the middle of a sunny mexican vacation, when i turned on the tv to check out some spanish programming and found out instead that benazir bhutto had been assassinated. i was shocked. it seemed surreal. of course there had been the deadly bomb blasts in karachi, killing 140 people in a ppp (pakistan people’s party) rally, assembled to welcome her home after 11 years of self-exile. there had been all the threats against her and her insistence on getting better protection from the government. but it still seemed unreal. my friend sue once described benazir bhutto as a rock star - she certainly had the entourage and that dramatic “big production” feel about her. she was also strongly backed by the u.s. it was galling to see her negotiate her party’s “package” with musharraf from the safe confines of the united states, like the exacting ceo of an american multi-national (so much for pakistan’s sovereignty). all of this made her seem untouchable, impervious to danger. yet, there it was. she had been shot. benazir bhutto was gone.

let me start by saying that benazir bhutto was not liked by most pakistanis. she was prime minister twice and both times she disappointed, monumentally. i remember the first time she was elected prime minister in 1988. this was after 11 years of oppression at the hands of general zia ul haq. the country was ready, no desperate, for change. we were suffocating. and benazir seemed to be the answer to our prayers. she was 35 years old. she was a woman. she was well-educated. and yes, she was zulfiqar ali bhutto’s daughter. we were glued to our televisions as she was sworn in - we could hardly contain our joy. democracy was finally working. we the people had elected benazir and we had high hopes for her. this euphoria lasted about a week. as soon as benazir came into power she made it clear that she intended to run pakistan like her ancestral fiefdom, back home in sind. this was her turn to loot the country and no one was going to tell her otherwise. the corruption charges just kept piling up. her husband was her front-man and they were making out like bandits. in 20 months, she went from being the darling of the people to pakistan’s most brazen plunderer. she thought that she had the power and pizazz to pull it off until she was removed from office by the president. she got re-elected in 1993 to be booted out once again in 1996, under similar circumstances. what a waste! what a gargantuan, wretched, miserable waste of an opportunity. this had been her moment in history. she could have changed the nature of pakistan’s military-dominated politics but she squandered every opportunity, twice.

were things going to be different this time around? not a chance. in the minds of many americans, benazir had bravely stood up to musharraf and asked for freedom and democracy. not so. while she had been busy outlining the demands of her executive package and finding mutually beneficial ways of working with musharraf, it was the lawyers, journalists and activists of pakistan who had shown astounding courage and stood up to a military dictator. they were the ones who were putting their lives on the line for the restoration of freedom and justice. when benazir realized that musharraf had no political currency in pakistan she conveniently latched on to this grassroots movement and began to talk the talk. yet the major political parties in pakistan did NOT lend their support to this movement. so while benazir was being portrayed as a righteous, house-arrested, populist heroine of pakistani democracy by american media, her party was not fighting that fight on the ground. the real heroes, lawyers like ali ahmed kurd, tariq mahmood, atizaz ahsan and munir a. malik, were on their own, left to cope valiantly with jail time and torture.

after musharraf sacked the supreme court and appointed his own cronies to legitimize his bid for “elected” head of state, instead of boycotting this sham election and asking for the restoration of the supreme court, benazir was more than happy to participate. these were the so-called elections she was campaigning for when she died. her death has come as a shock to the world but let’s not indulge in a diana-style romanticizing of her life. let’s not compare the bhutto dynasty to the kennedys. let’s not disneyfy her legacy. like william dalrymple has said: “bhutto was no aung san suu kyi”.

although i did not like benazir bhutto and had no confidence in her abilities as a leader or her intentions to govern pakistan in an honest and fair manner, i am deeply disturbed by her assassination. i am mortally afraid that this might have opened a pandora’s box. i do not want the politicians of pakistan to contest elections by having their opponents assassinated. i do not want the people of pakistan to live with the fear of being bumped off for any anti-establishment statement they might make. this is what frightens me - this sense of absolute power concentrated in the corrupt hands of a few. and this is why it is crucial that benazir’s death be investigated in the most meticulous fashion, by an impartial, international team. the perpetrators must be found and held to account. american aid must be contingent upon such an investigation. the stakes are huge. if we want stability in pakistan, and this is the refrain we keep hearing in the media, then we must make it clear that assassinations cannot become a political strategy, our faith in and adherence to realpolitik aside.

Pakistan’s flawed and feudal princess
It’s wrong for the West simply to mourn Benazir Bhutto as a martyred democrat, says this acclaimed south Asia expert. Her legacy is far murkier and more complex
William Dalrymple
Sunday December 30, 2007, The Observer

One of Benazir Bhutto’s more dubious legacies to Pakistan is the Prime Minister’s house in the middle of Islamabad. The building is a giddy, pseudo-Mexican ranch house with white walls and a red tile roof. There is nothing remotely Islamic about the building which, as my minder said when I went there to interview the then Prime Minister Bhutto, was ‘PM’s own design’. Inside, it was the same story. Crystal chandeliers dangled sometimes two or three to a room; oils of sunflowers and tumbling kittens that would have looked at home on the Hyde Park railings hung below garishly gilt cornices.

The place felt as though it might be the weekend retreat of a particularly flamboyant Latin-American industrialist, but, in fact, it could have been anywhere. Had you been shown pictures of the place on one of those TV game-shows where you are taken around a house and then have to guess who lives there, you may have awarded this hacienda to virtually anyone except, perhaps, to the Prime Minister of an impoverished Islamic republic situated next door to Iran.
Which is, of course, exactly why the West always had a soft spot for Benazir Bhutto. Her neighbouring heads of state may have been figures as unpredictable and potentially alarming as President Ahmadinejad of Iran and a clutch of opium-trading Afghan warlords, but Bhutto has always seemed reassuringly familiar to Western governments - one of us. She spoke English fluently because it was her first language. She had an English governess, went to a convent run by Irish nuns and rounded off her education with degrees from Harvard and Oxford.

‘London is like a second home for me,’ she once told me. ‘I know London well. I know where the theatres are, I know where the shops are, I know where the hairdressers are. I love to browse through Harrods and WH Smith in Sloane Square. I know all my favourite ice cream parlours. I used to particularly love going to the one at Marble Arch: Baskin Robbins. Sometimes, I used to drive all the way up from Oxford just for an ice cream and then drive back again. That was my idea of sin.’
It was difficult to imagine any of her neighbouring heads of state, even India’s earnest Sikh economist, Manmohan Singh, talking like this.
For the Americans, what Benazir Bhutto wasn’t was possibly more attractive even than what she was. She wasn’t a religious fundamentalist, she didn’t have a beard, she didn’t organise rallies where everyone shouts: ‘Death to America’ and she didn’t issue fatwas against Booker-winning authors, even though Salman Rushdie ridiculed her as the Virgin Ironpants in his novel Shame.

However, the very reasons that made the West love Benazir Bhutto are the same that gave many Pakistanis second thoughts. Her English might have been fluent, but you couldn’t say the same about her Urdu which she spoke like a well-groomed foreigner: fluently, but ungrammatically. Her Sindhi was even worse; apart from a few imperatives, she was completely at sea.

English friends who knew Benazir at Oxford remember a bubbly babe who drove to lectures in a yellow MG, wintered in Gstaad and who to used to talk of the thrill of walking through Cannes with her hunky younger brother and being ‘the centre of envy; wherever Shahnawaz went, women would be bowled over’.

This Benazir, known to her friends as Bibi or Pinky, adored royal biographies and slushy romances: in her old Karachi bedroom, I found stacks of well-thumbed Mills and Boons including An Affair to Forget, Sweet Imposter and two copies of The Butterfly and the Baron. This same Benazir also had a weakness for dodgy Seventies easy listening - ‘Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree’ was apparently at the top of her playlist. This is also the Benazir who had an enviable line in red-rimmed fashion specs and who went weak at the sight of marrons glace.

But there was something much more majestic, even imperial, about the Benazir I met when she was Prime Minister. She walked and talked in a deliberately measured and regal manner and frequently used the royal ‘we’. At my interview, she took a full three minutes to float down the 100 yards of lawns separating the Prime Minister’s house from the chairs where I had been told to wait for her. There followed an interlude when Benazir found the sun was not shining in quite the way she wanted it to. ‘The sun is in the wrong direction,’ she announced. Her hair was arranged in a sort of baroque beehive topped by a white gauze dupatta. The whole painted vision reminded me of one of those aristocratic Roman princesses in Caligula.

This Benazir was a very different figure from that remembered by her Oxford contemporaries. This one was renowned throughout Islamabad for chairing 12-hour cabinet meetings and for surviving on four hours’ sleep. This was the Benazir who continued campaigning after the suicide bomber attacked her convoy the very day of her return to Pakistan in October, and who blithely disregarded the mortal threat to her life in order to continue fighting. This other Benazir Bhutto, in other words, was fearless, sometimes heroically so, and as hard as nails.

More than anything, perhaps, Benazir was a feudal princess with the aristocratic sense of entitlement that came with owning great tracts of the country and the Western-leaning tastes that such a background tends to give. It was this that gave her the sophisticated gloss and the feudal grit that distinguished her political style. In this, she was typical of many Pakistani politicians. Real democracy has never thrived in Pakistan, in part because landowning remains the principle social base from which politicians emerge.

The educated middle class is in Pakistan still largely excluded from the political process. As a result, in many of the more backward parts of Pakistan, the feudal landowner expects his people to vote for his chosen candidate. As writer Ahmed Rashid put it: ‘In some constituencies, if the feudals put up their dog as a candidate, that dog would get elected with 99 per cent of the vote.’

Today, Benazir is being hailed as a martyr for freedom and democracy, but far from being a natural democrat, in many ways, Benazir was the person who brought Pakistan’s strange variety of democracy, really a form of ‘elective feudalism’, into disrepute and who helped fuel the current, apparently unstoppable, growth of the Islamists. For Bhutto was no Aung San Suu Kyi. During her first 20-month premiership, astonishingly, she failed to pass a single piece of major legislation. Amnesty International accused her government of having one of the world’s worst records of custodial deaths, killings and torture.

Within her party, she declared herself the lifetime president of the PPP and refused to let her brother Murtaza challenge her. When he persisted in doing so, he ended up shot dead in highly suspicious circumstances outside the family home. Murtaza’s wife Ghinwa and his daughter Fatima, as well as Benazir’s mother, all firmly believed that Benazir gave the order to have him killed.

As recently as the autumn, Benazir did and said nothing to stop President Musharraf ordering the US and UK-brokered ‘rendition’ of her rival, Nawaz Sharif, to Saudi Arabia and so remove from the election her most formidable rival. Many of her supporters regarded her deal with Musharraf as a betrayal of all her party stood for.
Behind Pakistan’s endless swings between military government and democracy lies a surprising continuity of elitist interests: to some extent, Pakistan’s industrial, military and landowning classes are all interrelated and they look after each other. They do not, however, do much to look after the poor. The government education system barely functions in Pakistan and for the poor, justice is almost impossible to come by. According to political scientist Ayesha Siddiqa: ‘Both the military and the political parties have all failed to create an environment where the poor can get what they need from the state. So the poor have begun to look to alternatives for justice. In the long term, flaws in the system will create more room for the fundamentalists.’

In the West, many right-wing commentators on the Islamic world tend to see the march of political Islam as the triumph of an anti-liberal and irrational ‘Islamo-fascism’. Yet much of the success of the Islamists in countries such as Pakistan comes from the Islamists’ ability to portray themselves as champions of social justice, fighting people such as Benazir Bhutto from the Islamic elite that rules most of the Muslim world from Karachi to Beirut, Ramallah and Cairo.

This elite the Islamists successfully depict as rich, corrupt, decadent and Westernised. Benazir had a reputation for massive corruption. During her government, the anti-corruption organisation Transparency International named Pakistan one of the three most corrupt countries in the world.

Bhutto and her husband, Asif Zardari, widely known as ‘Mr 10 Per Cent’, faced allegations of plundering the country. Charges were filed in Pakistan, Switzerland, the United Kingdom and the United States to investigate their various bank accounts.

When I interviewed Abdul Rashid Ghazi in the Islamabad Red Mosque shortly before his death in the storming of the complex in July, he kept returning to the issue of social justice: ‘We want our rulers to be honest people,’ he said. ‘But now the rulers are living a life of luxury while thousands of innocent children have empty stomachs and can’t even get basic necessities.’ This is the reason for the rise of the Islamists in Pakistan and why so many people support them: they are the only force capable of taking on the country’s landowners and their military cousins.

This is why in all recent elections, the Islamist parties have hugely increased their share of the vote, why they now already control both the North West Frontier Province and Baluchistan and why it is they who are most likely to gain from the current crisis.

Benazir Bhutto was a courageous, secular and liberal woman. But sadness at the demise of this courageous fighter should not mask the fact that as a pro-Western feudal leader who did little for the poor, she was as much a central part of Pakistan’s problems as the solution to them.

William Dalrymple’s latest book, The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi 1857, published by Bloomsbury, recently won the Duff Cooper Prize for History

My heart bleed