Quick Gun Murugun Bole Hadippa is a movie for Our Times. It ought to be made immediately!
“But Amrita!” you say. “Think! How could this abominable spawn of a movie based on a one-liner about a South Indian cowboy addicted to his sambar and Rani Mukherjee’s latest bout of sadistic hazing by the Chopras possibly be any good?”
Aha! But you think! Now that we live in a world wherein North Indians know that “Udipi Restaurant” is not the capital of the state of Madras Cafe and South Indians are aware that people up north have enough water to take showers, it is past time we came together as a nation and made a North-South lowe ishtory. After all, why must only Punjabis on either side of the border score all the nookie like so and so? Granted, Kamal Haasan did his romba best but that was romba years ago. It’s time for a reboot!
And Quick Gun Murugun Bole Hadippa, the exciting adventure of a swashbuckling dosa-fiend who wins the heart of a rough and tumble Punjabi cricketer by unleashing the power of sambar, would be perfect!
No longer will Southies be limp-wristed Bharatnatyam exponents lusting after scornful Northie girls – now nubile Northie girls will be doing the balle balle over the dashing technicolor cowboy of the Nilgiris. When the bad guys attack, national integration will come into its finest hour as the two take a deep breath blow them all away with the power of asafoetida. It’ll even have fashionably homoerotic undertones – and if any Mukti Morcha type person complains, then the movie can deploy the Rani-is-a-woman defense!
I foresee it becoming the new Roja – destined to be aired without fail every August 15th.
A friend and I were going back and forth on the pros and cons of subsistence farming, comparing the POVs of the Indian farmer to the interest expressed in Western locavore circles, when I saw this article about kiddies around America running naked and freaking people out. And it fit in perfectly with a general pattern that’s struck me over the years, another one of those “everything old is new again” things, how you can put one situation in two countries and arrive at two entirely different results.
In India, of course, most toddlers seem to be clothing strictly optional although it’s not for lack of modesty or a commitment to new age body images. Like any other child on the planet, my family’s albums carry a full complement of photographs in which I’m either gloriously naked (ok, I have a diaper on) and clearly happy about it; or else I’m swaddled within an inch of my life (complete with woolly hat – in South India!) and my face is a sulky, oily, thundercloud as I sit grumpily on someone’s lap, staring up at the camera with eyes full of misery. It’s no wonder I started talking early – I probably wanted to be able to shout “Off!” everytime they came near me with those sweaters.
However, as far back as memory serves, my mother believed in clothing me from head to toe. I don’t know if this was prompted by any special feeling of modesty – knowing her, she probably just wanted to dress me up in pretty little frocks. Going shopping is a very clear, very early memory. But somewhere along the way, I remember her and my aunts telling me I needed to learn how to sit properly because I was flashing my panties all over the place.
One aunt told me the correct person to emulate when sitting down was Lady Diana, legs pressed discreetly together at all times, never crossed. “Sounds ridiuclous,” Young Amrita said, in blissful ignorance of Older Amrita’s meek submission to the rule. Another one would physically pull my legs down if I propped them up, the way I loved to do. All of them told me morning, noon and night that nice girls acted more ladylike and ladylike = no flashing panties. I ought to have grown up into Britney Spears just to show them all.
Of course, I never learned a social lesson easily when I could do it the hard way, so one fine day Ma came home with… wait for it! Bloomers! “For active little girls” apparently. I have no idea where the devil she got her hands on one, much less the half dozen she bought. Since my idea of “dressing” at the time was to stick my paw out the bathroom door and wait for Ma to put clothes in it, I even wore those things. But she didn’t give up on the lady training.
In retrospect, I think she was overcompensating for my lack of sisters. When she was my age and learning decorum, she had her elder sisters to look up to. In fact, there are times when I think my grandmother’s basic MO in raising her daughters was to raise the first two very strictly and then tell them to raise the rest of them in a similar manner. And having failed to provide me with proper feminine role models, she decided to take over the position herself… with a vengeance.
I’ve always thought her dedication to the affair was fairly wasted on me because by the time a girl enters middle school, there is a vast amount of peer pressure to act “like a grownup” which frequently means acting like a peculiarly Victorian ho. You know what I mean – on the one hand there is the need to be all girly and chaste and wouldn’t know the meaning of all those dirty things if you said them vs. the need to try out your budding sexuality. Girls who flashed their panties in seventh grade didn’t have a lot of friends, I can guarantee you that. The ones who were wearing bras, on the other hand, were very popular.
But where do we get those impulses in the first place? It has to be from our mothers/ mother figures. If we didn’t have a healthy fear of the female authority figures in our lives and what their opinion of our behavior would be, would tween girls be as teeth-jarringly, piously moralistic as they can be?
Sigh. Watching Imraan Khan, the BabyFace Khan of ’08, trying to make his little action career happen even as debutante Shruti Haasan gives him a run for his money is making me nostalgic. For the good ol’ days when the long succession of BabyFace Khans knew the correct way to combine their milk chocolate goodness with their burning desire to kick the living daylights out of this zaalim world. After all, once age caught up with them and put a few lines on those chubby-wubby cheeks, they could always switch to kicking ass full time.
Remember these?
1. Back when Salman Khan could keep his clothes on, he knew what to do! He threw confused yet submissive pigeons at mean old daddies, hopped on and off farm machinery, and glared menacingly when swinging on a jhoola! Angrily! Till he fell down! It takes serious movie star talent to act like a three year old having a tantrum and sell it as passion. Kudos!
2. Aamir Khan did one better. He made out with Madhuri Dixit (dressed in full ’80s regalia!) in unisex jails, pried apart steel bars with the power of love, referenced myths and legends in verse, and managed to be so adorable while doing it all that he even got the police on his side. And as any young lover in India will tell you – that never happens… unless there’s a little money involved. Armed with just one song, he defeated the Establishment in all its forms – beat that, Enemies of Love!
3. For cold style points, however, no one can improve on Feroz Khan. When FK gets angry, he IGNORES HELEN! (Blasphemy! Off with his head!) He swigs the booze, he doesn’t care about the gambling, he hallucinates Mumtaaz, he breaks out in the booze sweats… and oh, yeah! he IGNORES HELEN! This, people, is clearly a man who is capable of anything!
4. Brother Sanjay, on the other hand, could never quite do the Angry Cadbury very well because… well, I don’t know. Maybe brimstone was in short supply at the Khan household. Who knows? But given the chance, he did his best by looking as angry as he could and walking off – which can’t have been too difficult, confronted as he was by a wooden-faced Babita clone drenched in bad lighting.
5. It is a generally accepted truth that Saif Ali Khan‘s reign as a BabyFace Khan was not his finest hour. In fact, he often had to shuffle off the angst part of his angst-ridden songs to his co-stars (like so). However, he is one of the few BFK’s that received the Pankaj Udhas Sulk treatment. I feel he fits in perfectly with others who’ve taken full advantage of the PUS, which allows an actor to look slightly overwrought (perhaps while knocking back glasses full of an unknown amber liquid) as the song does all the acting required.
6. As each BFK grew up, there was always another to take his place and carry the standard high. The man who screwed it all up, I feel, is Shahrukh Khan. Not only did he lack the main ingredient (baby face!) but he spent his BFK years relentlessly pursuing other men’s wives (in his debut movie, he makes off with Rishi Kapoor’s wife; in his breakout role, he tries his best to make off with Sunny Deol’s wife; and then, to top it all off, he even tried to make off with Deepak Tijori’s wife! The ignominy!) instead of nice, sweet, girls who were waiting, chastity belts firmly in place, for him to come wake them with love’s sweet song. They probably dodged a bullet, given the above, Ajooba suit and all, is what passed for a declaration of love in his BFK years.
This was going to be an entirely different post until I came across the absolutely awesome video above. I saw Jurmaana (starring Rakhee, Amitabh Bachchan and Vinod Mehra) a long time ago, but for some reason (senility?) I don’t remember the very beginning of it. And that’s entirely my loss. Because that is clearly the best part.
“You! Stop!” you say; but I say, “It’s! True!”
It starts, the way so many of these began in the 70s, with some guy in blackface and perm banging away at a drum that looks suspiciously like a jazzed-up mridangam. After energetically bouncing around to an aerobics routine set to what sounds like the beginning of Mehbooba Mehbooba (I guess R.D. Burman really liked that tune) for a minute or so, he and his powder-blue suit come to a halt so he can strike a pose and say: “Hey everybody! Come on! Let’s play a musical game! Will you?”
This gets some woman in Standard Issue Floozy Wear so excited she actually has to say, “You! Stop!”
Cut to: man in a suit, freezing on command.
It’s Amitabh Bachchan! In a silver half-mask! The only one, by the way, wearing one in this bar (?) where the musical game suddenly morphs into a beauty pageant. Although, it just might be a very creepy round of Pimp Out the Bar Maid the way they play it. You can’t really tell, what with the Ring-A-Ring-O’-Roses and the spotlights. Anyway, it all ends with one lucky girl being handed a cardboard tiara with what looks like a pizza cutter glued on top. It’s so amazing that AB has to peel off his mask to better appreciate it.
Apart from DangerMuff’s inexplicable fondness for Agar Tum Na Hote, a movie from the Later Kaka Makes Caca period, the review makes a very good point: what’s up with the Caucasian babies?
Ashok is really quite a sweet, normal man (so normal, in fact, that he does what every other Indian man does when his wife goes into labour: he sticks a big picture of an ugly Caucasian baby on the wall. Seriously, this is an ongoing thing in Bollywood, I’m not making it up).
As a person born in India, and especially as one who experienced her entire boyband-music collecting, cute-poster-gifting, friendship-band-exchanging, discreet-hand-holding, Archies-card-giving, romantic teen years there – I can clear up one thing at least: there are no Indian baby posters.
Well, maybe they have them now. Since I have no hysterically joyful babydaddy to send hopping through the poster aisle to check and I’m long past the age when I’d voluntarily take a walk through the Hallmark poster section, I can’t comment on the current state of affairs. But at least ten to fifteen years ago, there were no Indian babies to be found.
The reason I suspect was threefold:
A) Indians are superstitious about their babies. If a baby is cute enough to merit a mass produced poster, then it stands to reason a lot of evil type people will either covet it for themselves or be eaten up with jealousy that their babies are so obviously inferior to The Poster Baby. Hence they will put the evil eye on The Poster Baby which will then lead The Poster Baby to die or, even worse, grow up into Non Pretty Adult. Where Pretty = Fair. (Duh!) This is why the few Indian babies that make it out to the public eye are decorated with kohl somewhere on their face.
B) The companies that sell these posters tend to be those based in Western countries, like Hallmark. They barely put out any African American or Hispanic baby posters even though there are significant numbers of both in the United States, so why on earth would they want to look into Indian babies for India? Especially when Indians like Caucasian babies because:
C) White babies are whiter. And if you look at a white baby then maybe your baby will come out fairer. Thinking positive! It saves on the fairness creams later on.
Of course, after consulting with Google, I wonder if the real reason might be:
D) Indian babies are scary! Search for images of “Indian baby” and they all seem to have four eyes, ten limbs, play with snakes, fall into wells, are dying of preventable diseases, and so on.
And yet, I could swear I’ve seen Indian babies that aren’t like that at all. Time for an Indian Anne Geddes?
In my usual labyrinthine fashion, I started thinking about Gulzar’s movies last week and it ended up as a bout of Youtubing with unexpected results. On the one hand I finally sat through Lekin in full for the first time and really liked it. On the other hand, Hema Malini’s rather youthful Didi led me to her performance as the title character in Meera.
I never sat through Meera from start to finish either (when it comes to Gulzar’s movies, I find, I’m either riveted or else easily distracted. There never seems to be a happy medium – which is not a necessarily bad thing now that I think about it). Which must be why I don’t remember the music at all.
And now I wish I’d left it like that.
I’m sorry, I understand that Pandit Ravishankar obviously knows what he’s doing, Vani Jairam is a wonderful artist, and I’ve always loved Meera’s bhajans. But that accent…
I just can’t get past it. Plus (and this is rather unfair to Vani Jairam) I keep looking at Hema’s face and expect Lata Mangeshkar’s voice to emerge. Alternatively, I listen to the voice and expect Tamil.
I have a new appreciation today for M’s beef with Sadhna Sargam in Konjum Mainakkale.
You know, I try. I really try. Every so often I’ll read an interview that makes me think: What the hell is wrong with this moron? And then I’ll try really hard to give them the benefit of the doubt – maybe there’s some nuance I’m missing, they’re nervous, the magazine edited it wrong, I should pay more attention to the context…
It’s often an uphill task but I can usually find extenuating circumstances. But sometimes, a moron is simply being a douche. No help for it. Like Tusshar Kapoor’s interview in the July 8, 2009 issue of Filmfare, for example. (Psst! Does anyone know of a link? I fear posterity will never believe this phantasmagoria of a celebrity interview without hard proof.)
I know! I know! It’s my own fault! I brought it down on my own head. In my defense I was bored and I thought I was about to read a fluff piece on a dorky person. Who knew I was being granted an audience with a Master Douchebag? Not me.
The interview starts out innocuously enough with the usual “Who knew I, a star son whose sister is a famous producer, would end up in the movies? This is such a surprise to me!” stuff before it suddenly takes a turn for the bizarre when Kapoor admits he was rather “touched” by Ralph Fiennes’ role in The Reader. Coz this then gives the interviewer an in to say:
Speaking of being touched, what’s the naughtiest thing you’ve ever done in bed?
What? I swear to God.
This, of course, puts Kapoor at something of a disadvantage because he knows and we know that no matter how he spins it, the Indian version of a 16 year old chikna with a sexy illiterate auntie evokes shades of Savita Bhabhi rather than Kate Winslet (or, even worse, Shiney Ahuja rather than Fiennes). Although:
I don’t know about naughty but I can be very rough in bed. Some people like it rough. Maybe I’m not as caring as I come across in day-to-day life. I like forcing the other party into something that they don’t want to do or may not have done before. Let’s just say, just as I’m not shy in front of the camera, I’m not shy in bed either.
Yup.
This then segues into a short discussion about how he’s a boy-next-door who’s willing to strip off as long as it’s “not sensationalized” and how he’s willing to jump all over the casting couch for the right role – as long as it’s the right gender. Because, as he so penetratingly observes, with vaginas involved it’s just another way to score chicks:
Well if it’s a guy I wouldn’t. That’s too much of a compromise. If it’s a girl then you’re not just doing it for work. It’s like ek teer se do nishane (killing two birds with one stone).
At this, the interviewer asks him about playing a policeman. Don’t ask me why. I’m probably missing some sort of sexual subtext in the question and I’m too busy being grateful to examine it too deeply. So, obviously, the next question is this:
How profound…Have you ever dressed in drag?
At this point, I don’t know who I’d like to disembowel first – the interviewer or the interviewee. But fear not! Kapoor clears that up for me, right quick:
No, never. I hated the experience of dressing up like a woman in Golmaal Returns. Especially wearing those fake titties and then getting into the tight outfit. Then there was the chinky white make-up and eye tape. Hats off to the heroines who do this day in and day out. I’m really glad I’m a guy; I wouldn’t want to be a girl for even a day.
However, he goes on to say, his sister, who is an unlucky girl type person albeit of the non “chinky white make-up and eye tape” kind, and he are very well brought up and never throw things at people when they lose their temper although he’s “aggressive” and “she knows how to call a spade a spade” although she very kindly apologizes for that later on because she’s lovely like that.
This is spade.With the one on the left, you dig your grave. With the one on the right you play your cards. You're welcome.
Then there’s some stuff about how solo-leads are so yesterday as Rock On! has apparently proven before the interviewer comes back to his favorite subject.
If you were born again and you had a chance to be either gay or bisexual, which one would you choose?
Will nobody take this clueless child out to the garden and explain that this interview is an elaborate exercise in examining how he is such a huge Maybe Gaybe without the Maybe? Apparently not because the Jean-Paul Sartre of our generation says:
I don’t know how it is to be either. I think it’s most comfortable to be heterosexual. I can’t choose. I have a lot of gay friends; I know homosexuality is not a mental disorder; it’s a way of being. There’s just such a hue and cry about it, a gay person has to adjust in society. To avoid that hassle it’s better to be heterosexual. It’s harder for gay people. I’ll get some flak from them if this is misrepresented.
Ye gads! So simple, you stupids!
It’s like the self-edit button is jammed or something, isn’t it? Not that he need worry because the interviewer assures him:
Have no fear; we’re not into misquoting people at Filmfare. Though some other journos have speculated about your sexuality…
Curse you, Some Other Journos! Boo! Hiss! We don’t care for Some Other Journos! And to prove it, they then talk about how the media are assholes and Kapoor is above it all because he believes in himself. He loves himself so much, in fact, that he doesn’t really want to play any superheroes even, but if you twisted his arm then he’d play Batman because he likes the “comeback, underdog story”.
[Dear Batman fans: do not ask me what this means. I gave up on this shit about two questions in. XOXO!]
After he’s explained that he’s an actor who doesn’t aspire to play anyone else, he shares the fact that he is psychic has advanced intuition just like his friend Sunita Menon who is a grown woman who makes her living reading tarot cards. We are given undeniable proof of his abilities when he mysteriously divines that the interviewer is a townie with a few Parsi friends – and guess what?
The man totally is a townie and he’s half-Parsi to boot!
OMG!!! FREAKY!!!
In conclusion, he wishes all those illiterate people would stop having so many childruns who don’t go to school and thus have more childruns and so on until we’re all people and no country. Furthermore:
Nothing brings out the self-righteous quite like prostitution. You can write about adulterous politicians, scummy bankers, violent mafia bosses, vicious drug peddlers, self-appointed gurus, hedonistic celebrities, whatever you like – and it’s likely there’ll be a few people out there who just want to express their outrage.
But bring up the hookers and suddenly hardly anybody wants to say anything other than make clear that A) They think prostitution is wrong B) They are not for it C) Shame on all people who say anything than the first two. Of course, these days the web has turned into a vast confessional (not that there’s anything wrong with that!) so there’ll be a few people who’ll also chip in that D) They’ve hired certain services – just once! – and don’t see why it’s anybody else’s damn business and E) Human trafficking is a big problem.
Lost in all of this will be the actual issue at hand. Take Steven Soderbergh’s latest movie The Girlfriend Experience, about a call girl who provides the fantasy of being the client’s girl-friend, complete with conversation, dinner date, and cuddling up in bed. Or Tracy Quan‘s latest article on The Daily Beast about male prostitution.
I found both (and Quan’s work in general) to be fascinating, exploring a world that has been depicted time and again on screen and in novels, fetishized in some cases (Bollywood’s Virgin Whore, for example), and yet what do we know about it? It might be the world’s oldest profession, but like any other profession, people who’ve never availed its services or worked in it or been connected to it in some other way know little about it other than its barest definition.
As ER neared its series finale this year, for example, people involved in its conception remarked that it was an eye opener in its time because the audience up till then had no real idea of what went on in a hospital emergency room. Now I would wager that we’ve all seen a lot more ER doctors than we have prostitutes, and yet what do we all know about hospitals really? Similarly, if you’d asked me what I knew about the sex trade, I would never have replied that perhaps men who buy the services of a call girl would like her to pretend to be their girlfriend.
In fact, I thought prostitution must be all slam bam goodbye – an impersonal transaction like that scene from Monster’s Ball where Billy Bob Thornton hires the town hooker who casually walks into the room and exchanges brief pleasantries before pulling down her skirt and bending over. He could have been buying a pack of cigarettes at the local gas station. So this idea, explored in both Quan’s article as well as Soderbergh’s movie, that there’s a strong element of fantasy and connection involved took me aback.
Now that I think about it, of course, it makes perfect sense to me that the clients would like it to be something more than straight up sex. After all, even porn has a fantasy element to it. What I find interesting is that the people responding to Quan’s articles or Soderbergh’s movie or their like have certain fantasies of their own.
In the male hooker piece, for example, there were people who refused to believe, or at least pretended not to believe, that women could possibly pay for sex. Women are apparently too smart, too nice, too powerful, too emotionally strong to pay for it. Completely overlooking the fact that they’re apparently not too smart, too nice, too powerful or too emotionally strong to provide it.
Then there are people who’ll read the whole thing but then feel compelled to judge the people involved – and it’s not always the morality of the act itself that’s in question. There are those, of course, who feel prostitution is a sin and shame on everyone involved, but then there are those who wonder how the sex trade in general ties in to human trafficking, those who object to certain details, who can see certain discrepancies in the business model…
Anything really, to avoid looking prostitution in the face.
The immortal story of the forbidden love between a man and a skeleton.The love that no amount of experimentation could quench nor spirited sword play replace. He-Man will never feel for another man what he feels for Skeletor.
One of these is not like the Others: Megan Fox has camera-induced orgasm; Cate Blanchett politely looks elsewhere.
Today is one of those days when inspiration seems to have struck pretty much everyone but me. In other words: a happy day! There’s so much to read!
First up is Roger Ebert, defending his hilariousTransformers: Revenge of the Fallen review with this masterpiece of a smackdown:
But am I out of touch? It’s not a critic’s job to reflect box office taste. The job is to describe my reaction to a film, to account for it, and evoke it for others. The job of the reader is not to find his opinion applauded or seconded, but to evaluate another opinion against his own. But you know that. We’ve been over that ground many times. What disturbs me is when I’m specifically told that I know too much about movies, have “studied” them, go into them “too deep,” am always looking for things the average person doesn’t care about, am always mentioning things like editing or cinematography, and am forever comparing films to other films.
I’ve “forgotten what it’s like to be a kid,” another poster told me. One of the most-admired contributors to this blog, who signs herself “A Kid.,” is 12 years old. She hasn’t forgotten. Neither have many other readers of middle school age. Their posts give me hope for the future. For them, to be a kid is not to be uncritical or thoughtlessly accepting. They seek magic, and don’t find it in the brutal hammering of “Transformers.”
[snip]
So let’s focus on those who seriously believe “Transformers” is one of the year’s best films. Are these people wrong? Yes. They are wrong. I am fond of the story I tell about Gene Siskel. When a so-called film critic defended a questionable review by saying, “after all, it’s opinion,” Gene told him: “There is a point when a personal opinion shades off into an error of fact. When you say ‘The Valachi Papers’ is a better film than ‘The Godfather,’ you are wrong.” Quite true. We should respect differing opinions up to certain point, and then it’s time for the wise to blow the whistle. Sir, not only do I differ with what you say, but I would certainly not fight to the death for your right to say it. Not me. You have to pick your fights.
Here’s something to think on: everything he wrote about that movie is true… yet, it’s still not as bad as Kambakkht Ishq. Aaargh!
Talking of which, KI‘s music director was the man who gave us the immortal ditty, Dekho baarish ho rahi hai – It’s raining. It’s raining. Harini has the much appreciated antidote.
Next, did you know this is the 30th anniversary of the walkman? It’s true! Until 30 years ago, when people wanted to listen to music on the go, they had to hire a personal singer to walk hand in hand, singing them their personal favorites. It’s why generations of Indian women were married on the strength of their singing voice.
But as revolutionary as the walkman was, these days all the kids are playing with these things called teapots or peapods or something. They don’t know what they’re missing! So the BBC got a 13 year old from today to review the original! the bestest! the revolutionary-est! walkman. These were the results:
My dad had told me it was the iPod of its day. He had told me it was big, but I hadn’t realised he meant THAT big. It was the size of a small book.
[snip]
It took me three days to figure out that there was another side to the tape. That was not the only naive mistake that I made; I mistook the metal/normal switch on the Walkman for a genre-specific equaliser, but later I discovered that it was in fact used to switch between two different types of cassette.
Bah! Kids.
Which leads me to Nick Kristoff’s column about his top picks for children’s books. Now I had an atypical childhood as far as children’s literature is concerned and graduated fairly quickly to books that, in retrospect, I had no business reading. So there are some recommendations on that list that I’d never so much as heard of, much less read, like Freddy the Pig or Alex Rider. But I was happy to find that I’d managed to read the majority of them despite my odd reading habits.
And apparently I wasn’t the only one who felt strongly about the column – his attached blog saw more traffic on this one topic than any other (including endocrine disruptors – a.k.a. reason #435719 why parents are nervous wrecks).
Last, by way of dessert, I present this interview with Mavis Leno – one of the few celebrities I’d love to meet:
When did you have your feminist “click,” your epiphany?
My parents were not sexist, and my father thought I could do anything in the world and then some. When I was 7, I wanted to be a jockey. My father told me women weren’t allowed. I couldn’t believe it. I was perfectly willing to fail on my own merits, but to be flunked at birth? What kind of crap was that? That made me insanely angry. I read everything on the original suffragists, and they became my heroines, because the only women who ever did anything in the history textbooks of my childhood were Sacagawea and Betsy Ross and Marie Curie. That’s it. And Betsy Ross sewed. When feminism first became a high-impact issue at the end of the ’60s, flaming liberals like Mort Sahl turned out to be pigs, just pigs. Many of them have since recanted and apologized, but it shocked me.
As the LAT points out, Mavis has long been a campaigner for the rights of Afghan women. A country just one over from India. Which is something we might want to keep in mind, y’know?
