Speed of Life

View this post on Instagram Inspired by the music and lyrics of Bruce Springsteen. #BlindedByTheLightMovie – in theaters August 14. A post shared by Bruce Springsteen (@springsteen) on May 2, 2019 at 9:22am PDT From writer/director/producer Gurinder Chadha (“Bend It Like Beckham”) comes the inspirational drama “Blinded by the Light,” set to the music and lyrics of Bruce Springsteen’s timeless songs. “Blinded by the Light” tells the story of Javed (Viveik Kalra) a British teen of Pakistani descent, growing up in the town of Luton, England, in 1987. Amidst the racial and economic turmoil of the times, he writes poetry as a means to escape the intolerance of his hometown and the inflexibility of his traditional father. But when a classmate introduces him to the music of “the Boss,” Javed sees parallels to his working-class life in Springsteen’s powerful lyrics. As Javed discovers a cathartic outlet for his own pent-u...

by Gregg Chadwick In his first work of fiction,  The Wandering Falcon , Jamil Ahmad depicts a world caught between timeless paths of migration and geo-political modernity. Ahmad knits together a series of short stories that cover the life arc of one young man, Tor Baz - the wandering falcon of the title, as he journeys from infancy to manhood. Inspired by his time as a civil service worker in the tribal areas of Pakistan, Ahmad writes of a world governed by clan and custom. During his time as a powerful emissary of the Pakistani government under the tribal region's frontier governing system, Jamil Ahmad simultaneously served as politician, police chief, judge, jury and executioner. Bits of this personal history are woven within the stories, including hints of Jamil's wife's German heritage. Environmentalist and activist Helga Ahmad was instrumental in encouraging her husband Jamil to move from  halting first attempts at poetry to richly crafted stories of people, p...

Kamila Shamsie's novel "Burnt Shadows" uses a cinemascope vision to portray a Japanese woman's struggle to understand her life in a spinning world where historic forces seem to lead her and her family into an inevitable showdown with fate. Hiroko carries the memories and scars imprinted into her skin from the atomic blast in Nagasaki in 1945 from Japan to India to post-partition Pakistan. Her son Raza carries the memories into a politically charged New York where the events of September 11, 2001 still loom in our headlines. Shamsie deftly leads the reader through the haunted landscapes of the last sixty years and by distilling chilling historical events through the vision of one family her words shed light into the shadows of time. An important work that I highly recommend. More on the author: Kamila Shamsie: British Council Contemporary Authors Find "Burnt Shadows"

Sea Breeze, Bombay by Adil Jussawalla Partition's people stitched Shrouds from a flag, gentlemen scissored Sind. An opened people, fraying across the cut country reknotted themselves on this island. Surrogate city of banks, Brokering and bays, refugees' harbour and port, Gatherer of ends whose brick beginnings work Loose like a skin, spotting the coast, Restore us to fire. New refugees, Wearing blood-red wool in the worst heat, come from Tibet, scanning the sea from the north, Dazed, holes in their cracked feet. Restore us to fire. Still, Communities tear and re-form; and still, a breeze, Cooling our garrulous evenings, investigates nothing, Ruffles no tempers, uncovers no root, And settles no one adrift of the mainland's histories. (From the Oxford Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry ) When tragedy strikes, art has the power to connect. While searching my files for artistic connections to the events in Mumbai, I found the thoughts and writing...