The Power of Poetic Discourse

Poetry serves as a potent tool in providing insight, as it expresses universal themes and universal sentiments that enlightens readers. The poem of Countee Cullen entitled, â€Å"Yet Do I Marvel,† is one such piece of literature. In the first reading, the first eight lines of the poem, the octave, seems to illustrate examples of injustices. Cullen begins the poem by establishing that he does not doubt the goodness, the kindness, of God; but he questions the acts of God.Acts which seem to be incredulous, like creating the mole to be blind and yet making the creature toil and work without sight; making humans appear like him, but making them mortal; and handing down cruel punishments, as in the cases of Tantalus and Sisyphus, Greek mythological figures who suffer cruel punishments. Upon examination of the verses, however, the reader understands that these examples are not illustrations of injustice; they are instead illustrations that God is wise enough to render entities and ev ents in their current state.It is only right for the mole to be blind, because his natural task is to burrow hole underground, where sight is not necessary. It is only right for human beings to be mortal, because the soul is more important than the flesh, and without death, spiritual fulfillment could not be realized. It is only right for Tantalus to suffer hunger and thirst because his immoral act of stealing the food of the Gods, and presenting his son as a food offering was a terrible crime. It is only right for Sisyphus to work on a never-ending task because he was overly ambitious and vain to aim for eternal life.Following this insight, the reader is led to the thought that the last six lines, the sestet, offer the resolution that it is only right for a poet to be black and for God to, â€Å"bid him sing† (line 14, Cullen) because it is only appropriate for a black poet to express and articulate his hopes, his dreams and his sentiments about his people and about his race . Cullen clearly emphasizes the power of poetic discourse in this poem, a power he wielded during his time as an important Harlem Renaissance figure. Poetic Discourse Page 03 References (Please cite your source)

Morality Play Pattern in Pride and Prejudice

Austen is particularly unusual among virtue ethicists past and present in according amiability so much importance, even though it is so obviously central to most people's lives working, if not living, in close confinement with others with whom one must and should get along. Austen presents these virtues as not merely a necessary accommodation to difficult circumstances, but as superior to the invidious vanity and pride of the rich and titled, which she often mocks.So, in  Pride and Prejudice, Elizabeth Bennet rejects Darcy's haughty condescension out of hand; the happy ending must wait until Darcy comes to see beyond her lowly connections and unaristocratic manners and fully recognise her true (bourgeois) virtue. That is a moral happy ending even more than it is a romantic one. Like any good virtue ethicist, Austen proceeds by giving illustrative examples. This is why her characters are moral rather than psychological constructs.Austen's purpose is not to explore their inner lives, but to expose particular moral pathologies to the attention of the reader. Don't act like this: Don't cut off your relatives without a penny after promising your father you would look after them and justify it with self-serving casuistic rationalisations (as John Dashwood does in  Sense and Sensibility). Don't be like this: Morally incontinent like Mrs Bennet; or struck through with a single huge flaw, like Mr Bennet's selfish wish to live a private life while being the head of a family (Pride and Prejudice).But as well as excoriating such obvious though conventional moral failings of human nature, Austen attends carefully, and with a fine brush, to illustrating the fine detail, and fine-tuning, that true virtue requires. To show us what true amiability should be, she shows us what it isn't quite. Fanny Price, the heroine of  Mansfield Park, is so excessively amiable as to put her own dignity and interests at risk, so self-effacing that her true love almost doesn't notice her ( until events intervene).Mr Bingley's amiability inPride and Prejudice  is pitch perfect, but fails to discriminate between the deserving and undeserving. Emma, meanwhile, is very discriminating, but she is a snob about it: she is rather too conscious of her social status and does not actually respect others as she should (which, of course, gets her into trouble). Then there are the illustrations of what virtuous conduct looks like. Here one sees why the plot is so firmly in the author's hands, not the characters'.Austen is primarily concerned with setting up particular scenes – moral trials – in which we can see how virtuous characters behave in testing circumstances. These moral lessons to the reader are the parts she gave the most exacting attention to; where her words are perfectly chosen and sparkling with intelligence and deep moral insight. These are the parts that she actually cared about; the rest – the rituals of the romantic comedy genre and â€Å"s ocial realism† – is just background.We see Austen's characters navigating the unpleasant attentions and comments of boors, fools and cads with decorum and dignity: â€Å"Indeed, brother, your anxiety for our welfare and prosperity carries you too far,† Elinor chastises John Dashwood, ever so politely in  Sense and Sensibility. In every novel we see Austen's central characters working through moral problems of all kinds, weighing up and considering what propriety requires by talking it through to themselves or trusted friends.We see them learning from their mistakes, as Elizabeth and Darcy both learn from their early mistakes about his character (Pride and Prejudice). We even see them engaging in explicit, almost technical, moral philosophy analysis, such as debating to what extent Frank Churchill should be considered morally responsible for his failure to visit Highbury (Emma), to the evident boredom of the less morally developed characters stuck in the same ro om as them.Austen carries out her mission of moral education with flair and brilliance, while charitably respecting the interests and capacities of her readers (which is why she is so much more readable than most moral theorists who, like Kant, seem often to write as if understanding is the reader's problem). Yet there is one further striking feature that sets Austen's novels apart: her  moral gaze. The omniscient author of her books sees right through people to their moral character and exposes and dissects their follies, flaws and self-deceptions.I cannot read one of her novels without thinking – with a shiver – about what that penetrating moral gaze would reveal if directed at myself. This is virtue ethics at a different level – about moral vision, not just moral content. Austen shows us how to look at ourselves and analyse and identify our own moral character, to meet Socrates's challenge to â€Å"Know thyself. † We have all the information we need to look at ourselves this way, to see ourselves as we really are – we have an author's omniscient access to the details of our own lives – but we generally prefer not to open that box.Indeed, academic moral philosophers since the enlightenment have collaborated with this natural aversion by collectively turning their attention away from uncomfortable self-examination and towards elaborating coherent systems of rules that any agent should follow. Yet reading Austen shows the ultimate ineffectiveness of this strategy. I do not believe that all the sophisticated Kantian and utilitarian theory in the world could shield you for long from Austen's moral gaze.We should read Austen today because she is wise as well as clever, and because she teaches us how to live well not just how to love well. We should read beyond the  delicious rituals  of her romantic comedy plots to her deeper interests and purposes in creating her morally complex characters and setting them on displ ay for us. We should read beyond her undisputed literary genius, and her place in the history of literary innovations and influences, to her unrecognised philosophical genius in elaborating and advancing a moral philosophy for our bourgeois times.

Final project - Intellectual property (the ethical implications of Essay - 1

Final project - Intellectual property (the ethical implications of file sharing) - Essay Example File sharing, especially of music files, is popularly termed as theft, piracy or free-riding. An in-depth look at music file sharing shows virtues of friendship and sociability among users. This study aims at determining whether file sharing in general is vice or virtual. This study also tries to understand the impulsion of music sharing. Looking at the ethical implications of intellectual property, we observed in the year 2004, there were around 70 million people who actively participated in online file sharing. According to reported poll that conduced by the CNBC News in the year 2009, approximately 58 % Americans were involved in file sharing and in American norms; this is acceptable to enhance their knowledge and pleasure. They are the common opinion in UK that "if a person owns the music CD and shares it with a limited number of friends and acquaintances" it can not be termed as stealing of intellectual property. Hence, this sort of sharing increased to the extent of 70% within the age bracket of 18 to 29 year olds (Silverthrone 65). Creation of minds reflects in the form of new concepts, ideas, inventions, literary and artistic work such as writings, paintings, symbols, images and designs where it can appropriately be termed as an intellectual property. It can be divided into two segments:  a) Industrial property which comprised of trademarks, designs and b) Copyright in the shape of novels, poems, radio plays, screen plays, films, documentaries, music, paintings, drawing, photography and computer software.   The above mentioned creations come under the purview of copy right act. In this respect, we may include innovations and creations made by the local communities, as their cultural heritage is part of intellectual property (Greenhalgh & Rogers 135). Famous Software Foundation established by  Richard Stallman,  he has the view that the term intellectual property in its broader

Leadership Assessment Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words - 2

Leadership Assessment - Essay Example Control was basic to his nature and practice of management. He was always obsessed with detail and checking. Having gone through several legal problems, he never required any dealing that would cause errors (Heller, 2001). That is he only hired well-endowed engineers under extremely stringent conditions to avoid mistakes. In the delegated domain, he believed that recruitment of the best engineers would save him the strength of having to follow up issues in the different departments. The recruitment process is never short. Once hired, the autonomy is given to the managers who take up full responsibility of every action they do. That is however one of the best ways to have a human resource effectively discharging its duties (Heller, 2001). The company has never failed under him. The company for which interest is important is the Coca-Cola Company. This is a company that has maintained a high level culture and structure that it purely depends on this for continuity. In this company, the top management is at the prime of everything where there is the president and CEO Muhtar Kent. Immediately under him are the corporate and the manufacturing seniors. This is because these are the core and basic sections of the company being a producer company. The manufacturing is tasked with ensuring supply is efficient and marches demand in the market while the corporate staff takes care of management both at vertical and horizontal level at that stage. Being a multinational company, its marketing comes in hand to help keep its high profile stable in the wake of competition from other companies such as Pepsi. All these are aided by finances managed by the finance section of the company which lies at the same horizontal level as marketing. The next level is quite diverse and is categorical of the company being a multinational. The regional management in charge of the five international divisions is tasked with the work of co-coordinating operations in

How can technology bu used to improve hotel and restaurant Essay

How can technology bu used to improve hotel and restaurant operations(operations management for thr hospitality industry) - Essay Example Technological innovation has transformed every field of business today and the hospitality industry is no exception to the rule. In the past ten years, the improvement of technology has not only helped the global hospitality enterprises to grow rapidly, but also guided the consumer attitudes and consumer behavior. Therefore, the overall volume of the hospitality industry was promoted from quantity to qualitative. The modernized hotel collects the guest rooms, food and beverage, communication, amusement, commercial culture and other various kinds of services and facilities – it is an integrated consumption place. The hotel needs organization on a large scale as there are many there are many service items. Additionally, the amount of information that flows into a hotel everyday – like every modern organization – is large. If a hotel wants to improve labor produce, lower costs, improve the service quality and management level and promote the economic benefits of the organization, it must carry on the modernized information management through the computer. As we entered the Internet era, the sustainable development of the information and communication technologies is having a profound impact of the hotel industry. In 1963, Hilton Hotel of the United States installed a small IBM computer for the automatic managing of hotel rooms. This marked the beginning of using modern information technology in the hospitality area. As Law & Jogaratnam (2005) report, ‘with the increasing demand for intensive information from customers and hotel practitioners, hotels have adopted computer-based IT facilities to improve operational efficiency, reduce costs, and enhance service quality’. With the use of IT in their businesses, hotel managers expect that their profit margins and financial returns will increase. IT starts and ends with

The Effects of Leakage Radiation from X-Rays Coursework - 120

The Effects of Leakage Radiation from X-Rays - Coursework Example The paper reveals the contribution of Heinrich Hertz to the history of radioactivity through the discovery of the presence of radio waves. However, it was Henri Becquerel, who conducted further studies on the beneficial effects of radioactive waves. The paper reveals that the work of the two scientists led to the discovery of the possible uses of radioactivity. Madame Curie is credited for having carried out researches that led to the discovery of more uses of radioactivity. The paper also reveals the contribution of Thomas A. Edison about the use of the most effective calcium tungstate-based option in the radiation process. Hal Gray is credited for having discovered the health-related use of radioactive waves while Herman Muller was the scientist who is credited for the discovery of the fact that radiation directly contributed to the production of new genetic traits.Radiation refers to the process through which energy is emitted in the form of waves or particles. Radiation pioneers played a very important role in radiation history effects. Scientists started making the first discoveries about radiation and atomic structures in the 19th century. A scientist by the name Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen is credited for the discovery of the basic properties of X-rays. Henri Becquerel was the one who first discovers radioactivity. All these discoveries and studies had a significant effect on the history of radioactivity. From the ideas that the pioneers discovered, other scientists are able to discover more about the use of radioactivity. In comparing the understanding of the concept of radioactivity during the 19th century, and the understanding of the same currently, it is evident that there is a significant improvement in the understanding and application of radioactivity in various fields.

Assignment 5 Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

Assignment 5 - Essay Example In almost all cases, the modern teacher must learn a great deal of specialized technology to teach in an inclusive environment. One of the easiest areas to create solutions for students with disabilities is the no-tech solution to an impairment problem. The problem is often one of access. These solutions require a creative approach by the teacher without the intervention of large budgetary concerns or specialized learning. The simplicity of no-tech is that it is available to everyone, everywhere, and to all students (Roblyer, 2006, p.413). The only limits to no-tech solutions are the creativity of the teacher and the extent of the help needed. While no-tech solutions are readily available, they are only appropriate for students with limited impairment in isolated cases. Often times, no-tech solutions and access is not enough to meaningfully engage the student into the instruction. The low-technology solutions offer aids to students who require more than just access to the curriculum. They may have a learning disability that impairs their ability to read. It may be that the student has a visual impairment that requires specialized display equipment. The low-technology solutions may be a calculator, spelling dictionary, or magnification devices for sight. The IntelliKeys keyboard is an example of a low-tech solution that can be programmed to accommodate limited dexterity (Roblyer, 2006, p.412). These solutions are easily integrated into the classroom. Students with limited severity impairments can use low-tech solutions to solve a wide range of problems. As the classroom teacher confronts students with more severe and specialized disabilities, a high-tech solution is often required. High technology computer programs can assist students, but require a high degree of teacher knowledge and intervention. Voice recognition software such as Dragons Talk will require the teacher, or staff member, to attend a class or seminar

Moral Corporation Personal Statement Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Moral Corporation - Personal Statement Example Moral Corporation Since every organization operates in a given community, it is important for it to pay back to the community for allowing it to run its business in the community. An organization may not be able to achieve its objectives without the involvement of the members of the society. It is, therefore, necessary that the company should take care of the interests of the society as it does with its own objectives. That is a moral corporation. An organization’s stakeholders are the key success drivers. Therefore, behaving morally towards them will give a company a good image which will motivate the stakeholders to work harder to achieve the organization’s objectives. The practice shows that companies which show moral responsibility towards its stakeholders perform better than those who do not. This is because a morally responsible organization attracts better human capital and increases the cooperation of the stakeholders in executing the company’s operations. In order for a c ompany to exercise a moral social responsibility successfully, it needs to establish a Corporate Social Responsibility Program which will ensure that the needs of all stakeholders as well as the welfare of the society are well taken care of by the company. Moral responsibility concerns an organization’s behavior towards the society as well. It means that the company should behave ethically towards the members of the community within which it conducts its business. First of all, it should be responsible for its actions. Morally responsible organizations ensure that their operations are not only in line with the law, but also responsive to the welfare needs of the society at large. Appropriate mechanisms need to be put in place in order for companies to contribute towards a sustainable working environment and economic development. One of the ways to take care of the needs and welfare of the society is environmental conservation. Organizations in such industries as oil, automobi le, and mining have a great impact on the environment by their activities. In order for such businesses to contribute to a sustainable development, they should use approaches which are able to minimize the negative impact on the environment. A profit oriented business should operate in a sustainable environment where business operations can be undertaken smoothly without major challenges. Therefore, every organization that is determined to achieve its primary objectives should take care of the environment by minimizing negative impacts on it. Oil, automobile industries among others often contribute to environmental pollution and cause greenhouse effects which are dangerous to human life and affect the climate. If human life is threatened and the climate is affected, the economic conditions of a country will be affected negatively and business environment will also be negated. In this case, the profitability of the business will decrease in the long run. Therefore, organizations must maintain a good green environment for the success of their businesses. Mining also leads to environmental degradation and pollution. This may make land unproductive and threaten human and animal life. This also leads to the unsustainable development which results in poor performance of organizations in the long run. Such businesses should, therefore, ensure that they always behave responsively towards the community by undertaking environmental-friendly or green operations. Another way by which an organization may demonstrate

International Resort and Spa Mangement Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

International Resort and Spa Mangement - Essay Example On one hand, they interact with the customers and getting the information from an external environment. On the other hands, Boundary Spanners are also the communicate stage between management team and customers. So the company has to achieve and motivate them to get the effective performance. The Boundary spanning individuals develop partnerships and collaboration though building sustainable relationship, seeking to understand the motives, responsibilities and roles and also managing through influence and negotiation. For the organizations, they will create the strategic alliances, to join working arrangement and partnerships of collaboration to pass the organizational boundaries. (Williams, 2002) As the theory from Kurt Lwin and his associates at the University of Lowa (1938), they mention about the different style and level of empowerment to the staff such as Autocratic, democratic and laissez-faire. It verifies the important of employee to be empowered and how it provides a higher quality work with participative leadership. (Cherry, 2014) The empowerment in management is needed, it provide the area and stage for the employee to make a decision and critical think the best way to finish the job, it improve work and staff quality. In the hotel industry, one of the best examples of a successful business with empowerment in management is Ritz-Carlton. The Ritz-Carlton was the best employer again in 2013 because the company always trusts and says, â€Å"This award identifies the valuable contribution each person makes to our business on a daily occasion. We pursue to build a culture that stands up to our credo and where each principles of trust are applied, respect, honesty, veracity to exploit the talent to the advantage of each person and the company.† (Ritz-Carlton, 2013) The company respects and trusts the employee’s opinions and offers them the empowerment to make a decision during interact with customers. It brings up the positive effect for

Capital Punishment Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words - 1

Capital Punishment - Research Paper Example Political campaigns, religious leaders, and foreign press make quite a spectacle of how the United States legal system regularly sentences people to die for the crimes they have committed. As such, the United States is a bit of a novelty in the developed world as one of the last few 1st world countries in which the death penalty is not only still legal but employed in great numbers (Debrevnik, 2004). This short analysis is far too brief to provide the level of critique that a topic such as the death penalty deserves; however, this analysis will discuss a few of the strengths and weaknesses of the death penalty in its current form and weigh them against some of its greatest weaknesses to provide the reader with a clearer understanding and sense of moral responsibility with relation to whether or not the death penalty is a net good or a net evil in the criminal justice system and in our society as a whole. It is necessary to note that although this author is in favor of the death penal ty, there are many serious drawbacks to its application, the high economic costs it entails, and the oftentimes arbitrary nature with which it has been historically employed. Although these concerns are valid, the author maintains that notwithstanding many of the current drawbacks associated with the death penalty, the morality and ethics behind it are still poignant enough to merit its support. From a purely economic standpoint, capital punishment is an extraordinarily expensive form of punishment. As compared with life in prison, the average cost of execution is approximately the same cost to keep a prisoner housed and fed for over 100 years. Currently, the average cost of execution in California exceeds 4 million dollars per criminal executed. Comparatively, the average cost to keep a prisoner housed and fed as well as ensuring proper health care and medicine usually does not exceed $35,000 per year (Semeshenko et al, 2012). At such an exorbitantly high expense, it is clear that choosing capital punishment on the grounds that killing the criminal will somehow save the state money over time is entirely illogical. As such, the argument for execution does not hinge on economic savings; instead, it hinges upon the Judeo-Christian belief of â€Å"an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth†. In this way, the major supporters of the death penalty believe that certain crimes are so heinous that rehabilitation is not possible. As such, one’s life is forfeit for certain crimes if convicted. This further raises the tangential issue of the purpose of prison; whether it is it to rehabilitate or to punish. According to death penalty activists, prison’s primary objective is to punish with rehabilitation being a very distant second. A secondary issue with the death penalty in its current form is that they death penalty has been proven not to be a significant deterrent against the crimes it punishes. With the United States being a prime example, it is ob vious that murder rates in the United States are comparably higher than almost any other nation that currently does not have the death penalty as a legal option for a convicted criminal. Accordingly, the death penalty cannot be seen as adequate deterrent to dissuade would-be criminals from committing crime; however, it can be seen as a barometer of a society’s overall tolerance for violent crime and the clear and

The Determination of an Equilibrium Constant Essay Example for Free

The Determination of an Equilibrium Constant Essay During our experiment, it became clear that there were a variety of errors due to procedure that has culminated in anomalous results producing an inaccurate Kc value. There are two main sources of inaccuracies; systematic errors and equipment errors. The main sources of systematic errors were:  ( i ) The amount of phenolphthalein added to the solutions  ( ii ) The difficulty in judging the exact point of colour change from colourless to pink during the titration. ( iii ) The difference in judging where the bottom of the meniscus is.   The systematic errors are non-quantitative; therefore it is impossible to predict the effect of the errors mathematically. But, due to the repetition of the titration, we are increasing the precision of our results, thereby decreasing the event of an error being produced. Therefore the systematic errors have a relatively insignificant role in our errors.  The experimental errors were a result of the inaccuracies from the equipment:  ( i ) The burette has an inaccuracy of +/-0.05cm3, thus resulting in a cumulative error of 0.1cm3 and the pipette had an error of +/- 0.1cm3. ( ii ) Minor inaccuracy from the 100cm3 standardizing flask.  As the results of the experimental errors produced quantitative errors, it is possible to work out the results in account with the percentage of errors due to the equipment. The calculation has been shown on the analysis sheet. The error due to the burette was (0.05/16.8) x 100 = 0.3%, and the error due to the pipette was (0.1/1) x 100 = 10%. Therefore, the total error due to equipment was 10.3%, ignoring the inaccuracy due to the standardizing flask as it is so small it can be ignored. Another large source have error cannot have been foreseen. We based our experiment on the fact that the solutions we were given were in equilibrium, but we cannot be sure that this is true. Although the solution were left for a week, to make sure that our solutions were in equilibrium, we could leave the solution for a longer period of time to improve the likeliness of an equilibrium being maintained. As my results can prove, the precision was very good as my results were close together, but my value of Kc was almost 30% of the data book value of 4.0 for this reaction. As a class, all the solutions should have produced the same Kc value, therefore having the class averages for all the solutions can allow me to analyse the accuracy of my results in comparison to the other experiments: Kc Averages for experiment:  1. 3.49 no units  2. 1.28 no units  3. 4.11 no units  4. 2.55 no units  The overall average for the Kc is ( 3.49 + 1.28 + 4.11 + 2.55 ) / 4 = 2.86 no units. Therefore, as my result for the Kc was 2.82 (no units), with respect to the class, my results were very accurate. Unfortunately with respect to the actual data book value of 4, my experimental error was off by 30% resulting in a fairly inaccurate real result.

Young Goodman Brown | Analysis

Young Goodman Brown | Analysis The conflicts between the everyday battles and forces of good and evil are portrayed the story, Young Goodman Brown. Nathaniel Hawthorne uses many symbolic elements, from the characters names in the story and throughout until its delusional ending. They show us that sin is a part of human nature and that no man is perfect beyond any means. The presence of evil appears as Brown begins on his journey. He had taken a dreary road, darkened by all the gloomiest trees of the forest, which barely stood aside to let the narrow path creep through, and closed immediately behind it. Forests are used to symbolize wickedness, evil and danger. The road that is to be travelled is very dark and small, and it is enveloping him as it closes swiftly behind him, displaying the abandonment of his faith. What if the devil himself should be at my very elbow! This symbolizes that he is, in fact, walking along side the devil on this dreary road into the forest. Moments later a companion appears, Young tells him, Faith kept me back awhile, which explains that he had been faithful to his beliefs for some time, and then decided to cross over to the evil world. This said; it could be that this companion is in fact the devil himself, when his staff is noticed, bore the likeness of a great black snake, so curiously wrought, that it might almost be s een to twist and wriggle itself, like a living serpent. The staff being referred to as a serpent, can be compared to the serpent in the story of Adam and Eve. This is an excellent reference to how certain things in life can be deceitful, and the knowing of what is right and wrong. There comes a point in the story where Goodman Brown states, Is that any reason why I should quit my dear Faith, and go after her? This is when he begins to question his journey on the road between good and evil. It is then suggested by his companion, Sit here and rest yourself awhile; and when you feel like moving again, there is my staff to help you along. The devil is now leaving behind the sole key and the permission for Brown to join him in the world of evil and corruption, and then he walks away. This plays out in life as it is known today. As Browns journey into the forest continues, he hears voices and decides to hide. It vexed him the more, because he could have sworn, were such a thing possible, that he recognized the voices of the minister and Deacon Gookin, jogging along quietly, as they were wont to do, when bound to some ordination or ecclesiastical council. This is a symbolization of betrayal. With the Minister and Deacon out in the forest in the middle of the night, and the previous symbols involving the devil, Goodman Brown might have a feeling of being betrayed by his faith and feel alone. While he still gazed upward, into the deep arch of the firmament, and had lifted his hands to pray, a cloud, though no wind was stirring, hurried across the zenith, and hid the brightening stars. The thought of being abandoned overcomes him and he begins to pray to the heavens but is surrounded by the forest and its evils. The cloud symbolizes the dangers of allowing your surroundings, family and friends to become a blind fold and shield ones eyes from their beliefs. Eventually young Goodman Brown reaches the circle of the wicked, their voices joined in song. This dreadful anthem was joining the sounds of the nature and wilderness around him. Fire is represented here, which could also symbolize the anger and the passion for the fight of good and evil. The devil now begins his sermon, Depending on one anothers hearts, ye had still hoped, that virtue were not all a dream. Now are ye undeceived! Evil is the nature of mankind. Evil must be your only happiness. Welcome again my children, to the communion of your race! Even from the beginning of the story, it is foreshadowed that this whole story is in fact a dream. Hawthorne states in the beginning A lone woman is troubled with such dreams, gives an indication that this is a dream. Also, the reference to evil being a nature of mankind and of it being your only happiness is extremely wicked and satanic. The ending of the story does in the end rest the mind that this was in fact a dream. A stern, a sad, a darkly meditative, a distrustful, if not a desperate man, did be become, from the night of that fearful dream. It appears that the realization of disbelief in his faith, Brown woke up and lived the rest of his life as a bitter and untrusting man. And this states that the devil got the best of him. Nathaniel Hawthorne does an excellent job utilizing symbolism in this story to depict a real life battle that many of the human race struggle with everyday. The dark forest that Brown traveled, was not just a setting in the story, but an illustration of the journey though everyday life. And Young Goodman Brown shows us that it is easier to get side tracked on the right paths and travel on the wrong side.

The rhyme scheme of Sonnet 65

The rhyme scheme of Sonnet 65 In Sonnet 65, Shakespeare shows us very little hope that beauty will be able to endure the forces of time and mortality.   By the end of the poem, the author explains that the only place beauty will be immortalized is in his writing.   In making his point, it appears Shakespeare merely poses several emotionally driven, rhetorical questions, however these questions are logically coherent.   By the poems end, these questions lead the speaker and reader to an acceptable solution for the preservation of beauty. The rhyme scheme of this poem (ABAB CDCD EFEF GG) separates the fourteen-line sonnet into three quartets and one final couplet.   By posing seven consecutive questions without any solution, the author creates a grave sense of despair.   Not until the couplet is the reader exposed to a shimmer of hope.   Each cluster of lines, utilizing different sentence structure, fits into the logical progression of the poem.   In the first quartet, which is the first sentence as well, the speaker asks us to consider how well beauty will be able to fair against mortality.   If stone, earth, sea, and brass all fall victim to mortality, how then will beauty be able to last?   He uses legal terms like hold a plea, which in modern English changes to the term make a case.   When contemplating his second question, the speaker changes from metaphors based on legal images to metaphors of war and belligerence.   Time is presented as a wreckful siege of battering days.   Once again, the despair is heightened because of the hopeless situation into which beauty is placed.   The speaker asks if rocks and gates of steel cannot withstand time, will beauty be able to last?   Adding to the despair of Sonnet 65, in these first two quartets, Shakespeare presents beauty as a delicate and meek object, and contrasts it with fiercer imagery.   Beauty, represented as a flower and summers honey-breath, is positioned within the same sentence as a boundless sea, gates of steel, and rocks impregnable, among others. When moving from the first to the second question, Shakespeare flips the sentence structure.   In sentence one, the objects beauty is being compared with (earth, stone, etc.) are placed first, then the force that will destroy beauty (mortality) is noted, followed by the sentence kernel (beauty hold a plea), and finally the sentence kernels modifiers.   In the second question, the kernel is placed first (summers honey-breath hold out), followed by a metaphor for time (wreckful siege), then the forces beauty is being compared with, and finally the ruinous force (time) is noted.   Up to now, the speaker has used the entire quartet to pose a single question.   In the final quartet, three questions will be asked within the space of four lines.   Shakespeare begins the final quartet with an interjection, O fearful meditation! (such scary thoughts), referring to the outrageous opposition beauty must face, as mentioned in the first two quartets.   He has posed two questions thus far, and has offered no insight on answering them.   Another three rhetorical questions, logically interlocked with the preceding eight lines, are asked in this final quartet.   These questions are designed to deepen the tone of despair until we are given any definite solution in the final couplet. The first question Shakespeare presents is, . . . where, alack, Shall Times best jewel from Times chest lie hid?   The immediately striking wording in this clause is Times best jewel.   Literally, the most outstanding creation that has ever existed is beauty.   Time and beauty, especially in the second quartet, have been suggested to be opposing forces.   Time, thus far in the sonnet, is the force that is trying to ruin beauty.   Now we see that time is the very force that is responsible for the creation and destruction of beauty; beauty exists because of and within times power. Shakespeare chose chest as the speaker tries to determine where beauty will finally find safety.   Throughout this sonnet, and especially in this quartet, words with multiple denotations are used to increase the complexity of the poem.   Chest, on one level, can refer to the chest of a human being.   (We have already seen time personified with pronouns like his, and on line 11, time is given a human appendage: a foot.)   Shakespeare means that beauty will finally reach safety when it is wrapped in times arm and nestled in his chest.   Chest, on another level, can be interpreted as a box where items of reverence can be stored in safekeeping.   Moving on logically with the idea of mortality and death in the first quartet, a chest is the coffin that beauty is seeking to avoid. Another question Shakespeare poses in this quartet is, Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?   Once again, the author is personifying the concept of time by using the pronoun his.   The most literal meaning of this question is along the lines of: who will be able to prevalent the destruction of beauty?   However, spoil has two other meanings that relate to the context of Sonnet 65.   The first plays on the war metaphor in the second quartet.   The spoils of war refer to objects seized in battle.    In the second quartet, time was described in terms of a wreckful siege.   Shakespeare has already asserted that time and beauty quarrel.   Now, unless someone or some force intervenes, beauty will be lost like treasure that has been seized in battle.   Moreover, spoil can refer to a plot of land that has become unserviceable in some way.   Metaphorically, beauty has been compared to a delicate flower and the honey-breath of summer, which is the sweet smell of blossoming flowers.   If the ground is ruined, flowers, or beauty, cannot flourish. The remaining question Shakespeare asks in this quartet is, Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back?   Two key phrases should be examined in this line.   The first is his swift foot.   In acquiring a human foot, time is further personified.   More importantly, he is saying that time is swift moving.   The image of the foot here creates an image of a running person.    Either the speaker is fearful that time, as it runs, will trample and destroy this beauty, or that time, passing by very quickly, will overlook beauty and forget it.   In the other important phrase, the speaker is searching for a strong hand that can hold back the foot (of time).   On a most literal level, the strong hand is the image of a human hand capable of restraining the foot that is about to kick or trample beauty.   On another level, he can be looking to his writing hand as the hand that allows beauty to endure.   In either case, he is desperately searching for a way to avoid devastation. In the final rhymed couplet, the speaker discloses the solution on how beauty can be preserved.   Shakespeare knows that beauty cannot survive forever as a living being or as an idea in his head.   The only way it can endure is through his writing, therefore he claims, O, none unless this miracle have might, That in black ink my love will still shine bright.   Nothing can prevent the ruination of beauty but this poem.   First, Shakespeare affirms the notion on line 11 that the hand capable to hold back the swift foot of time will in fact be his writing hand.   Beauty will last in the black ink he uses to jot this verse.   All other preceding questions have been answered.   Placing himself at the level of God, Shakespeare asserts that he has a power that ranges over divine forces like time and mortality.   And no one has the ability to preserve beauty like he. There is uncertainty as to whether beauty refers to a specific person, or to the feeling of being in love.   I believe, with a poem as emotionally driven as this, and by comparing beauty to the scent of summer (the feeling of a summer fling), Shakespeare is speaking not about an individual, but about being in love.   However, there will always be much debate on this topic.      Shakespeare poses several emotionally driven, rhetorical questions, however these questions are logically coherent.   By posing seven consecutive questions without any solution, the author creates a grave sense of despair.  Despair is heightened because of the hopeless situation into which beauty is placed.   Time, for most of the sonnet, is the force that is trying to ruin beauty.  Shakespeare repeatedly personifies the concept of time by using the pronoun his.   But later on the reader is made aware that time is the very force that is responsible for the creation and destruction of beauty .Words with multiple denotations are used by Shakespeare to increase the complexity of the poem.   By making use of innovative literary devices, Shakespeare creates definitive meaning of beauty and time, intertwined with a sense of complete despair.

Correlation Between Drug Use and Suicide Essay -- Drugs Drug Suicide E

Correlation Between Drug Use and Suicide   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  America's on-going drug abuse epidemic continues into this millenium, and there are many social problems linked to drug use, including suicide. The disparity of daily life in suburbs or the inner cities are why many people have fallen into their reliance on drugs, including alcohol. Patros and Shamoo (1989) describe the abuse of drugs and alcohol as a 'slow form of suicide.' But many drug abusers choose to end their life before drugs have time to claim it by way of an overdose.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Contradictory to popular belief, teens are not of the majority of drug related deaths. Teenagers made up just two percent of drug related deaths in a 1994 survey of coroners. Many of these numbers are down dramatically from the 1970s, when illegal drugs were more available throughout the United States. Half of drug overdoses and suicides nationwide are men age thirty-five to fifty-four. Possible reasons for the dramatic difference between teenage drug deaths and middle-aged drug deaths are mid-life depression prior to drug use, more time to build as worsening habit, and the fact that most young people are primarily experimenting with drugs and not using them on a full time basis. Interestingly enough, Vietnam veterans had a higher level of drug-abuse fatalities than the rest of the population, probably due to their exposure to drugs derived from opium and the use of drugs to avoid flashbacks. Suicide rates among female drug users are higher t...

A Remarkable Woman Of The Early West :: Free Essay Writer

Margaret Ann Martin was born in Greenfield, Nelson County, Virginia on January 20th, 1834. Her parents were Hudson Martin and Nancy Thorpe. Hudson Marton was born in Virginia in 1765. At the close of the Revolutionary War, Giddeon Martin, his after moved to Kentucky. Giddeon Martin had fought for seven years in the Revolution under General George Washington. Hudsont Martin and Nancy Thorpe were married March 22nd, 1824. The following children were born to this union John, their only son, and daughters Jane, Mahalley, Margaret Ann, Nancy and Jennie. They were raised in Virginia. Margaret Ann's mother died in 1859 and her father in 1861. Margaret Ann was married to Andrew Jackson on December 16th, 1858. They loved in Broxton County, West Virginia. Andrew Jackson, joined with the Confederate Army and was made Captain of Company B-19th Virginia Cavalry. Mrs. Jackson was ordered north in the fall of 1863. All of her possessions and property were confiscated and she was allowed to take only her two saddle bags of clothing, approximately sixty pounds of baggage. She was carried on horseback, under a flag of truce through the Confederate lines to her house in Virginia. During his four years of service in the army, Captain Jackson came home to visit his wife three times. On one visit, he only had time for dinner with her and had been gone about fifteen minutes when the house was surrounded by soldiers. Once he came for a visit overnight and at another time for nine days. At the close of war, Captain and Mrs. Jackson moved to South Carolina two years in the fall of 1865hey started West by ox teams, stopping in Bandera Couny, Texas, where they remained until 1873. Mr. Jackson was running a sawmill there. They left Texas, May 1873 with three wagons and ox teams, driving five yoke of oxen to one wagon and four yoke each to the other two wagons. They avaraved from twenty to twenty five miles per day. At night, when camped, two oxen were necked together and belled. They spent that winter in Trinadad, Colorado, where they could have good range for there cattle, remaining there until May 1874 when they started north on the third leg of their journey, going out by Larma City, Pueblo, Denver and down to the great Salt Lake, hence to Corrine into Idaho, down the Snake River to Munds Ferry, then out over the Powder Range into backer City, Oregon. From here they traveled into Grand Round Valley, crossed the Blued mountains into Walla-Walla and continued up the Columbia

Essay --

Scott Derrickson’s Sinister is a popular movie which is well-known by the public. It is renowned for its extremely horrifying storyline. While not only being a horror flick, this film belongs to the genre of thriller too. This movie is disturbing, as it is filled to the brim with unusual killings, and also not forgetting the supernatural elements embedded in it. The director, Scott Derrickson, who is notable for directing many popular horror films, wrote this screenplay with the genius concept of using a â€Å"found footage† that he is sure will trigger the audiences’ curiosity. Derrickson has a really good skill set for horror. He loves the idea of elevating the genre beyond the norm. The inspiration for Derrickson to film this movie happened when he had a nightmare about going up into his attic and finding a box of Super 8 films about ghastly murders. He had been noodling around with a story based on that ever since. The theme of this movie is an unexpected one as no one would have foreseen something so serious to happen out of something so small. The main character, Ellison Ostwalt, played by Ethan Hawke, relays the theme really well in the movie. He is devoured by his drive and determination to return to his professional glory that he unintentionally put himself and his loved ones in danger. Derrickson uses selfishness as the theme to remind the audience how this attitude can lead to unpleasant consequences. Ellison Ostwalt’s selfishness in the movie â€Å"Sinister† brought upon tragedy to his family in various ways. Ellison Ostwalt, a true crime writer, is on his last fumes of fame after his best-selling book, â€Å"Kentucky Blood†. He is tired of not having as much popularity. As such, he is determined ... ... has correctly implied the theme in this film. This movie teaches us to not be so self-centered but to show a more caring attitude to the people surrounding us. Of course, it is important to always have the initiative to improvise and improve in whatever we are doing and in this case, our career, but only to a certain extent. Honesty is also very important as honesty and trust are one of the many fundamental principles in maintaining a loving and caring family. As they say, honesty is the best policy. For instance, Ellison lied to his wife and hid the information about the haunted house from his family. This action has caused many consequences to all of them. Therefore, being honest is necessary too. Sinister has conveyed the theme as a message to the audience of how important is it to not be so self-conscious and to remain grounded and unselfish.

The Scarlet Letter: Passage Explication

Honors American Lit. B Kathryn Durga The Scarlet Letter: The Child at Brook-side3/22/13 In this passage Dimmesdale is speaking about Pearl standing on the other side of the stream refusing to go to him and Hester. The contrast between Pearl standing on the opposite side as them parallels the contrast in their lives. Hester, now not wearing the scarlet letter, and Dimmesdale are concealing their relationship and their sin in the forest, representing a world of secrecy. Pearl, however, is representing a world of truth by refusing to join them until Hester once again wears the ‘A’, which throughout the book has been Hester’s truth.The two separate worlds that they’re a part of cannot come together until they change; Dimmesdale wants Pearl to be the one to change by joining them in their new plan to escape to Europe and by joining them in their lie. Pearl however refuses to be with them until they join her in her truth. This is exemplified by Pearl not going to her mother until she wears the ‘A’ and by Pearl rejecting Dimmesdale. Pearl washes off Dimmesdale’s kiss after he once again refuses to hold their hands in public, showing yet again how much she rejects dishonesty.Dimmesdale refers to Pearl as an elf which is defined as, â€Å"one of a class of preternatural beings, especially from mountainous regions, with magical powers, given to capricious and often mischievous interference in human affairs, and usually imagined to be a diminutive being in human form†. This parallels to Pearl’s character very well because she is very capricious, her mood often changes very quickly and she can be really unpredictable also throughout the book she seems to be meddling in the affairs of Dimmesdale and Hester by not allowing them to live in secrecy.When Dimmesdale says Hester can never meet Pearl again it shows a strong divide between Hester and Pearl as Pearl is still very innocent and pure while her mother is conve yed as a sinner, similar to the way Christians in the bible view sin as a wall between a person and God. Hawthorne says later in the chapter that the separation was the fault of Hester not the fault of Pearl meaning that it was because of Hester’s transgression that the divide happened not because of anything Pearl did. This shows that Hawthorne believes that sin separates people and that doing something wrong to a person can damage the relationship.This moment shows how Dimmesdale doesn’t want to tell the truth; he wants to be in a loving relationship with Hester but doesn’t want to deal with the sin that they shared. At the moment Hester is carrying the full load of their punishment while Dimmesdale claims he is suffering however he has not had to face the scrutiny of the town the way Hester has. Dimmesdale is asking Pearl to join him in his deceitfulness however she is doing what her mother is not doing by refusing to love and accept Dimmesdale until he revea ls his truth and has to deal with the punishment that Hester had to deal with.Overall Hawthorne uses this quote as imagery of the brook and a simile of the separation of the worlds of sin and truth and also uses this to characterize Dimmesdale as a dishonest person. â€Å"‘I have a strange fancy,’ observed the sensitive minister, ‘that this brook is the boundary between two worlds, and that thou canst never meet thy Pearl again. Or is she an elfish spirit, who, as the legends of our childhood taught us, is forbidden to cross a running stream? Pray hasten her; for this delay has already imparted a tremor to my nerves. ’† (pg. 188)

Van Sant’s ‘Death’ Trilogy: Gerry, Elephant and Last Days

Gus van Sant's three films, Gerry, Elephant and Last Days, are, in essence, a trilogy, linked by their common structures, compositions, and representations of death. In this paper, I will analyze these similarities and discuss the treatment of each film's central event. Van Sant's early career showed a unique experimentation with story structure and plot devices. In films like My Own Private Idaho, Drugstore Cowboy and To Die For, he displayed a freedom of narrative, creating esoteric, poetic pieces that challenged and often bewildered viewers. His career then became more conventional, and he hit somewhat of a lame lowpoint with the film Finding Forrester, a sappy story about a young black teenager whose writing gifts are altruistically recognized by an aging author played by Sean Connery. His next film, however, was completely different than anything he had directed. It starred Matt Damon and Casey Affleck, who, along with van Sant, would normally create box office demand with their work. Yet the film was not widely released or widely seen. It was mostly dismissed as an indulgent experimental piece, something created by Hollywood artists bored with their usual work and with easy access to too much funding. Van Sant followed this with a film that premiered at Sundance and, surprisingly, took the top prize. It purported to be a representation of the Columbine killings, even though Columbine was never mentioned, and several liberties were brazenly taken with facts that most people were intimately familiar with. It featured no professional actors; actually, the characters were all essentially playing themselves, even using their real names and shooting in their actual school. The film was much more widely seen, and the unique treatment of time and plot proved to be very similar to his previous work. His most recent film, officially titled Gus van Sant's Last Days, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival and attempted to vaguely recreate the death of Kurt Cobain. The thematic elements and structure were by now easily recognizable. The film's first reviews were harsh, but eventually, critics seemed to warm to it, and it was widely praised for its bravery and patience. Van Sant refers to them as a â€Å"news story† trilogy, in that they are all based on real events. Gerry is about two guys who get lost in the desert, and one of them eventually kills the other one. Even if we're unfamiliar with the event, we can picture the sensational headline, probably depicting the event as horrific and the murderer as an animal. Van Sant's portrayal of the event, from the characters losing their way to the actual murder, reveals his intent to fully immerse himself in the event and depict how such an act could occur. When we witness the murder, it appears natural and even compassionate. The circumstances under which the characters are behaving are unusual and extreme, but their intentions and humanity are always recognizable. The next two films are events with which the culture is very familiar. Almost everyone who sees them has a strongly formed emotional impression of the stories. The Columbine massacre and the suicide of Kurt Cobain are two of the most omnipresent cultural events for this generation of Americans, and van Sant chooses to take them on. His intentions are similar to those of his first film in the series; he wants to discover, through the process of filmmaking, how such acts could occur. It is unclear as to whether van Sant intended to create a trilogy, but these films are unmistakably similar in several different ways, including their shooting and editing style, their themes, and their attempt to depict a â€Å"found story†. Common Style Cinematographer Harry Savides shot the trilogy, and his style remains consistent; it can best be described as meditative. Most of the elements and techniques were developed in the process of making Gerry. The shooting period lasted twenty-one days. There were lots of problems during the shoot, and the scenes were always planned and executed on set, in collaboration with the actors, and with very little adherence to a shooting script or written dialogue. During this process, van Sant and Savides developed what would become a signature style for them. They composed very long tracking shots of the characters simply walking through the desert. Some shots were close-ups of their faces as they trudged, always with a definite purpose and determination. Others were long shots of their tiny bodies against the hugeness of the landscape. The most famous shot is the two of them barely moving, close to death, silhouetted against the sunset, still moving slowly towards nothing. Another element they developed is a lack of adherence to any definite sense of time or chronology. The films are edited haphazardly, with several scenes repeated at different points in each film from different perspectives. In Gerry, the two men never find water, yet the sun rises and sets at least eight times during the movie, in very different settings. In Elephant, one hallway encounter between two characters, with another character running by, is seen three times from each characters' perspective, and continually serves as a warning that the killers are about to enter the school. There is no attempt to operate by any logical standards of time or character arc. The focus here is on a creation of atmosphere. The flexible chronology and the long static shots create a strong sense of freedom for the actors to immerse themselves in their characters. In each movie, and especially in Gerry and Last Days, the characters operate in a trance-like state, moving through the world of the film with no attempt to relay an emotion or communicate to anyone in any way. They simply are, and we watch them as voyeurs, knowing in each case that they are moving slowly towards death. The process of close collaboration with the actors is similar for each film as well. The actors are very much a part of the development of the story and their own characters. This trust in the actors to create their own worlds adds a unique element to the trilogy. Common Theme The central theme of the three films is â€Å"young death†. The first death is a compassionate murder; the second deaths are emotionally empty executions; the last is a slow wasting away. They all seem tragic because of the age of the victims and the somewhat easily avoidable circumstances under which the deaths occur. The deaths are also empty of crescendo. There is no sense of narrative closure in the deaths of the central characters, or an attempt to draw moral or dramatic conclusions from the deaths. This treatment of death is similar to the films analyzed by Catherine Russell in her work Narrative Mortality: Death, Closure and New Wave Cinemas. She notes that conventional cinematic narratives â€Å"codified the desire for meaning as a desire for meaningful death, and the desire for ending was formalized as a desire for death.† 1 She claims that new wave films â€Å"consistently split death from closure, and prevent meaning and ending from fitting neatly together.† These films have no plot or story; they end abruptly, with no attempt at coherent explanations. Their focus is on the world of the characters as they hypnotically and obliviously move towards their death. Common Intentions: A ‘Found Story' This refusal to exploit the deaths of the central characters for emotional or dramatic effect highlights van Sant's focus on creating realist cinema. He strives to present each scene as naturally as possible, with no cinematic affectations or even unnecessary camera movements. They wanted no â€Å"moves†. He and Savides make it clear that their intention is to recreate reality on screen. Realist theorist Siegfried Kracauer defines a ‘found story' as one that â€Å"emerges from the filmmaking†. 2 This description aptly describes van Sant's triptych; the process clearly defines the product. An example of this comes from the production of Last Days. Van Sant was in the costume designer's office when a Yellow Pages salesman entered and delivered his pitch. The director envisioned the affect this would have on his drugged-out, detached lead character and threw the two worlds together. The effect was brilliant in that it intensely highlighted the two different worlds that these characters inhabited. It also reveals van Sant's attempts to infuse his films with as much realism as possible, down to the actors who portray the characters. In fact, the actors are usually playing themselves. In Elephant, each character uses their real name and moves around their actual high school, interacting with their actual friends. The scenes are meticulously composed, but the dialogue and relationships, the individual moments, are mostly improvised, providing the audience with a strong sense of voyeurism and recognizable interactions. The affectations occur during editing. The sound design and aforementioned obscure chronology are the clues as to how we interpret the reality that they present. In Elephant, a character that most recognize as the eventual killer walks through the cafeteria drawing up his ‘plan'. He stops and we hear the sound slowly rise and overwhelm the boy, implying his â€Å"special mode of reality†.3 In Last Days, a somewhat bizarre element is employed in one of the final scenes. Blake, the Cobain surrogate, is lying in his garden house, close to death. Suddenly, his spirit emerges from his naked body as an apparition and hovers beside him. This mystical element meshes with the hypnotic, often spiritual mood of the film. At first glance, it seems to stand in stark contrast to the dogmatic realism of the rest of the film. However, the scene effectively illustrates the characters' state, and in this sense, remains consistent with the production's intentions. These common elements all serve the common event in each film: the eventual deaths of the major characters. Gerry Gerry depicts two characters, both ostensibly named Gerry, wandering through the desert looking for â€Å"the thing†. They see tourists with lame visors taking one path, and they decide to take another. They lose their way and spend the film attempting to survive. Each interaction between the characters is infused with purpose and a wry humor. They always have a new plan and never lose their forward-thinking state of mind. They resist despair and anger and seem always to assume that they will make it out ok. The majority of the ninety-minute film consists of the characters moving through the desert, searching always for the way home. There is maybe fifteen minutes of dialogue and, except for the tourists, no other characters. We see them simply walking, moving together, sometimes in what seems to be a competitive state, and other times alone, separately climbing different peaks to get a better view. The desert scenery is beautifully composed, and there are few shots less than a few minutes long. The characters are resisting death. They are slowly succumbing to the elements, fighting thirst and fatigue, never wanting to appear weak to the other. They always keep moving. Once, when they have stopped to rest, one of them comes to the other, tired but satisfied. He says, simply, â€Å"I found the car. I have water. I know the way out.† He is convinced of the truth of this claim, and is extremely disheartened when, after a few minutes of forceful persuasion, he realizes it is an illusion. Eventually, after moving around for what could be days, they lie down, exhausted and in a trance. One is clearly stronger than the other and is capable of continuing; one is finished. They lie next to each other, staring at the sky. Suddenly, the strong one moves on top of the weak one, wrestling him, literally shaking the life out of him. He stabs him and he bleeds, giving in quickly to the loss of consciousness. No emotion is displayed, and the event seems natural and pure. The act is clearly one of compassion for the pain of the weak one, a hastening of the inevitable and a cessation of the pain and agony and waiting. It is an act of euthanasia. However, it is also an act of survival; the strong one is now free to move again and attempt to survive on his own, which he eventually does, seeing the highway before him shortly after the murder. There is no lesson in the death, or any sense of closure. It is simply an act, and it bleeds into the reality of the rest of the film, having no special significance. It comes and passes in the same manner as the rest of the journey. It is a violent act, somewhat selfish, and it occurs in the vague context of an allegorical journey. The film is about being lost and eventually succumbing. However, there is never a sense of panic from the characters, or a sense that they have lost control or even hope. There is an acceptance at one point, when they lie down, and some timid shedding of tears from the weaker Gerry. But the characters admirably remain focused on survival and getting out, on proving their strength against the elements and their own thirst and exhaustion. The stronger character's devotion to this elusive hope eventually saves him, and he finds his way, leaving behind a friend who, all elements aside, he had murdered. He rides away in a car, still in a trance, looking back at the desert. The film is beautiful, and it is essentially a meditation on the struggle to survive. Elephant Elephant is a montage of different students at a public high school. Because the audience knows it is about the Columbine murders, the outcome is a given. Each ‘victim' is introduced with a title card, and we see them in their world, interacting with their friends, with no exposition or context. We know what high school is, and we understand and recognize the basis of the conversations and relationships. Scenes and characters intertwine as new characters are introduced and followed. Various social issues are broached in the context of the characters' lives, issues that have all been mentioned in the context of the killings as an attempt at explanation or blame. The first shot is a weaving car, casually sideswiping a parked car and almost hitting a biker. It creates a reckless and irresponsible tone, depicting apathy towards life and danger. We see that it is a drunken father driving his son to school, and the son demands that his father pull over and let him drive. He is not angry, just exasperated, and the issue of parental carelessness and forced responsibility of the child is depicted. We see the boy being disciplined by the principal and feel pity for him and his circumstances. We are introduced to three popular girls as they flirt with a boy and then eat lunch. They enter the bathroom, awkwardly discuss their body issues, and casually, simultaneously, vomit. The killers are at home, receiving weapons in the mail, which they have ordered over the internet, and practicing with them in the garage. The shy, geeky one, earlier seen picking spitballs out of his hair and plotting in the cafeteria, is playing Beethoven, slyly invoking A Clockwork Orange. The blond, outgoing one, who slyly invokes Eminem, enters his room and plays a generic video game, playing a character wandering through a vast white empty landscape shooting men in suits in the back as they slowly and obliviously walk towards the horizon. Video game violence is thus invoked as a ‘factor'. Later, as they prepare to enter the school for the massacre, the blond one enters the shower with the shy one and says, â€Å"I've never even kissed anyone, have you?†, and they embrace. Another element, repressed homosexuality and a sense of separation, is introduced. These issues are peripheral to the mood of the film. It is amazingly ominous. We see the killers entering the school with their arsenal very early in the film, and are repeatedly reminded of their entrance as other characters pass through the same time period. We never know when the first shots will occur. We know from the news that the library and the cafeteria were the scenes of the massacre, and we repeatedly hover there, watching characters, picturing the chaos about to occur. It is visceral and exciting, and sickening and bizarre. Van Sant, without affectation, makes us fall in love with some of the characters, simply from the purity of their interactions and their lives. He highlights their beauty, and exposes their talents and quirks. Even the killers are presented almost sympathetically, or at least without any attempt to vilify them. We observe their normal lives, at breakfast with their family, practicing the piano and playing games, and their relationship is almost pleasant to watch. We see their psychosis, however, and realize very soon that they are capable of total detachment and extreme violence in retaliation for a vague sense of being underappreciated and emotionally tortured. The killings finally begin, a few scenes after we hear the machine gun being cocked in the library. The geeky girl with the long pants in gym class arrives late for her job in the library, and as she speaks to the boys with their arsenal, they splatter her blood against the books. They turn and randomly shoot into the crowd of scurrying students. The killings are not gruesome or ugly; they are simple and easy. We meditate on the killers' callousness and the painful pointlessness of the act, rather than recoil at the blood and shock of the shootings. We also never see a panicked face or hear a shrill scream; the deaths, as in Gerry, blend with the everyday we have adjusted to seeing. The world does not change because of the acts that occur. The ending is extremely abrupt; the killers meet in the cafeteria, and as the blond brags about his kills, he is ruthlessly shot in the head by the shy one. He is speaking, we hear a shot and see blood, and he falls out of frame. At first, we are not sure if he was shot by another student or a sniper, but when we see the shy one, in the same long shot, moving towards the freezer looking for more victims, we realize. The film ends as he finds a popular couple whom we know and he obviously despises, and tortures them happily, pointing the machine gun at them and reciting eenie meenie miney mo. The film takes place in a single morning, in the span of a few hours. The characters we meet have no thoughts of their fate, wandering through their lives as death approaches in a sedan with a devil hanging from the windshield. Van Sant chooses an extremely familiar event and gets inside what might have happened. What he manages to create is a total sense of normalcy in the high school. There is no sentimentality in this film, this depiction of an event that is so loaded with emotion and sentiment and anger and backlash and blame in our culture. He strips it down and rips away all the sensation, and reveals easy to know people in an easy to know situation about to face something horrific and familiar to us all. His intentions and approach are similar to that of the film United 93, about the September 11th plane that crashed in Pennsylvania. We all know the details, we have all felt the sentiment, but the film attempts to forget all that and show real characters in a real situation, without any sentimental pretensions. It tries to depict how such an event really looked. In Elephant's case, this is done in service of a meditation on the casualness of violent death. Last Days Last Days depicts the deterioration of a rock star, based on the suicide of Kurt Cobain. The first shots are of Blake walking through the woods, urinating in a pond, vomiting, and singing Home on the Range by a fire and a tent. He returns to his house and wanders ghost-like through the halls and rooms, avoiding contact with any of the stragglers in the house, cooking macaroni and cheese and watching a Boyz II Men video. We see the state of his life intimately, and his world becomes recognizable. He is out of it and detached, and has no desire to connect with anyone. He carries around an ominous shotgun in several scenes, and at one point, he mimics shooting two of his friends as they lie in bed. He is in a trance. He literally hovers in some scenes, slowly, slowly, collapsing to the ground and resting, comatose, against the door, falling violently when it is opened and a straggler checks for his pulse. No one in this film wants anything. No one, especially Blake, has any sense of purpose. This is the weakness of the film from a cinematic standpoint. Gerry and Elephant remain fascinating in large part because of the strength of their characters' intentions and purpose. In this world, no one feels anything. The peripheral characters might have intentions relating to a vague sense of hedonism or greed, but that is not near enough to drive the film. This is about a wasting away, a slow, drawn out surrender to death, a suicide. The wallpaper is crumbling, the house is falling apart, no connections are made, and we are witness to a man who is totally numb to the world. It again features the long, static shots of seemingly nothing, zooming in on the television, holding on Blake's lifeless body on the floor. There is a beautiful shot of Blake experimenting with sounds in his studio. The camera slowly moves backward, and we watch for an extremely long time as he moves around the room, haphazardly enjoying himself with his instruments, seemingly at peace, In the end, we see him cowering in the garden room, watching characters come and go, completely alone, and ready for an ending. This is a meditation on decay. Death These films very effectively reveal worlds that simply are. The characters we follow slowly approach their death, one at the hands of his friend, others at the hands of gun-toting teenage psychos, the last, presumably, by his own hand. But, in fitting with the tone of the trilogy, death simply is. It happens just as casually as the taking of a photograph or the preparation of macaroni and cheese. When it happens, nothing is done to signify or indicate any sense of change or profundity. The realism of the films is, to me, something almost euphoric. There is a real beauty in the interactions between the characters, in how recognizable their worlds are, and because of this, the audience receives a gift: there is a chance at a profound understanding of the nature of what happens to them.

Bollywood and Liberalization Essay

Bollywood as a term has been roughly in vogue for the last four decades and is synonymous to the Hindi film industry of Mumbai, formerly Bombay. But not until recently the term Bollywood has become a global phenomenon with the hay days of the economic liberalization or globalization in India since 1991. But before we delve deep into Bollywood, it is imperative that we should throw light on the economic phenomena of globalization and its socio-cultural impact on India. Towards a definition of globalization: According to the Oxford dictionary, globalization is the process by which businesses or other organizations develop international influence or start operating on an international scale. From the above definition of the term, it is difficult to draw its influence on a culture and its impact on a global scale. If we take the example of India, which in turn, is the world’s largest democracy and the largest potential market for its ever growing population, it should be borne in mind that Firstly, Globalization implies free trade and mobility of goods, which has flooded the Indian market with innumerable foreign products, Secondly, as the flood gates of foreign business opened to India, it exposed the indigenous business to the crude and highly demanding uneven market competition which resulted in the obliteration of a number of Indian companies. India was primarily a sellers’ market, but due to high population and a considerably huge market in comparison to the European ones with a few indigenous competitors, India turned int o a consumers’ market. According to Brian Longhearst, Globalization is a term that tries to capture the rapid social change that is occurring across a number of dimensions, including economy, politics, communications and culture†¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦. where socio economic life cannot be firmly located in a particular place with clear boundaries. Hindi films, by the turn of the last decade of the previous century, have been an embodiment of these socio economic shifts. These shifts are in accord with the cultural shift that has been inflicted by the globalized order of things. Spectrum of the Indian market had changed overnight due to the flooding of a host of foreign products in the indigenous markets. If we consider the classical Marxist approach of the relation between an economy and its culture, economy of a state is its base and the culture that thrives there is the superstructure built on that base. So an economic implication on a nation inevitably influences the cultural practice of the societies of that nation who are exposed to that economic base. In P. Joshi’s ‘Bollylite in America’, Bollywood has been meant for a ‘culture industry that remains constitutively international in production and global in consumption.’ Popular for its Hollywood remakes and reformulation of popular Hollywood films, other regional language films (Tamil, Telugu, Bengali, Bhojpuri, and Malayalam language) and even old films, the term Bollywood has come to represent both an acknowledgment of the debt the directors and technicians of the Hindi film industry owe to Hollywood for their creative ideas as well as a description which challenges the monopolistic hegemony of Hollywood across the globe. In this regard, Asish Rajadhyaksha presents a very interesting definition of Bollywood which enhances us to understand the industry in a better way than the usual consensus about Bollywood. According to him, Bollywoodization can be best understood as a †¦..diffused cultural conglomeration involving range of distribution and consumption activities. But this definition is prevalent only after it has incorporated the ethics and contradictory forces of globalization like privatization, and liberalization which changed the production and consumption of Mumbai films. The near universal legitimization of the term Bollywood (instead of Hindi cinema, Bombay cinema, Indian popular cinema, etc) is an index of larger social transformations taking place in India. Changes in the Film Industry from 1991 It is imperative to throw light on the media sector of India and its subsequent effect of the liberalization policies. With the arrival of the satellite and international television channels in 1991 in India, the media scenario underwent a radical change in the entertainment arena as well as the financial policies of the same. Hong-Kong based Star TV, a subsidiary of News Corporation, and CNN started broadcasting into India using the ASIAST-1 satellite. This was followed by an unprecedented and dramatic expansion of cable television. The ‘open skies policy’ under the new liberal economy suddenly exposed the Indian audience to a whole new set of cable channels from all around the world as well as from different regions of the country with their own regional languages. Hollywood films, whose views were limited to the availability of VHS cassettes and film halls, were now easily available on Star Movies and others. Therefore, the changes in the media landscape along with po licy initiatives by the state precipitated a number of changes which in turn altered the Hindi film industry in the most dramatic fashion. However, 1998 saw a landmark decision which accredited Bollywood with the status of industry which facilitated the film industry to avail financial support from the government – film industry became eligible for infrastructural and credit supports which was previously available to other industries. In addition to this, the film industry enjoyed reduction in custom duties on cinematographic film, complete exemption on export profits, and tax incentives. Changes in the Exhibition and Promotional System With the policy shifts owing to the liberalization process, single screen theatre halls were started being replaced with the multiplexes, especially in the metropolitan cities like Mumbai, Chennai, Bangalore, Delhi and Kolkata. With the sophisticated financial policies for films starting from its investment to its exhibition, the film industry became corporatized with a. development of websites for promotional activities of Bollywood films as well as the studios and the big production houses, b. aggressive marketing and promotional activities for film music, which was having a stiff competition with the newly found indie pop songs, c. incessant and aggressive campaigns of the newly released films in radio, television and other forms of media like mobile phones, d. increase in the ticket prices of the films in the multiplexes, e. the stars of the Hindi films started appearing in interviews, television shows and press meetings more than ever before, f. advertisements started endorsing the stars who became regular faces in the satellite television channels. According to Ravi Sundaram, circulation of thousands of various media objects (both old and new) in the forms of print flyers, signage, mobile phones, music cassettes and CDs, created a ‘visual frenzy’ centered around Bollywood. New Challenges for Bollywood It is true that the film industry turned into a new global Bollywood with a lot of economic and financial facilities only after the economic liberalization, but for the same open market policies cinema in India and all across the world started facing stiff challenges from other forms of media, especially television. Bollywood faced enormous pressure in every sense to maintain and attract the audiences to the film theatre from the tele-visual extravaganza. Previously the narratives were surrounded with the poverty stricken community and how a working class hero struggles to defeat the corrupt rich villains. It also accommodated the familial and community ties which proved to be more essential and core to the existence of the individual. But now Bollywood films increasingly began to depict India’s shifting relationship with the world economy through images of a hybrid relation between the national and global – there was interestingly some conscious deletion on thematic gr ounds like ‘jhoparpatti’ (slums) and struggling protagonist in poverty and community feeling more than the feeling of a responsible citizen. The new filmmaker of Bollywood started adopting thematic structures and narrative devices which are in accord with a broader audience who are exposed to international cinema, international sitcoms and a feeling of becoming a new global Indian under the happy charm of globalization – both economically and culturally. These strategies adopted by Bollywood to incorporate expanding audience tastes and desires can be best described as taking global formats equipped with updated visual styles, while localizing, adapting, appropriating, and ‘Indianizing’ theme . In this case, a term becomes central to the point of discussion – Glocalization, which is an amalgamation of globalization and localization. Structures of the newly evolved Bollywood films can be labeled as glocalization. Bollywood and the Glocal The term glocalization was first coined by Robertson in his seminal essay, ‘Glocalization: time-space and homogeneity-heterogeneity.’ In the essay, he rejects and nullifies the binaries between the global and the local, the centre and the periphery, universality and particularism as models to comprehend the phenomena of globalization. Considering these models to be inadequate, Robertson says that glocalization captures the dynamics of the local in the global and the global in the local. The theory of glocalization holds true for a phenomena like Bollywood in the era of globalization. Let us read these characteristics: a. As Robinson theorizes further, he proposes that the theory of glocalization as a way of accounting for both global and local, not as opposites but rather as ‘mutually formative, complementary competitors, feeding off each other as they struggle for influence’. Now, the polarization between the global and the local and the notion that the local undergoes a slow death under the immense pressure of the global orders does not hold true. In Bollywood films after globalization, we see a new sense of Indian nationalism has found its way – more than ground level patriotism of defeating the anti-nationalist villains, nationalism now is more of nostalgia for a motherland that the characters have left behind. Therefore, this patriotic feeling is invested in the Non Residential Indian characters in today’s films. Almost all the films produced today have their protagonists settled abroad, but are Indian to the core, or even if they are Westernized, it often becomes t he point of conflict in the film which finds its resolution in the national values and traditions of the native nation. An important term vehemently used in academics in this regard is ‘Diaspora’, which means the movement, migration, or scattering of people away from an established homeland. b. The very idea of glocalization has been attacked by many theorists for being apolitical in nature and being without any teeth or resistance to the sinister forces of globalization. The same dictum goes for Bollywood as it is an industry to cater to a wide audience ever more to generate profit. Going by this logic, there has been a deliberation by the Bollywood industry to shift its focus from one kind of target audience to the other kind – the target groups have shifted from the rural and urban lower, lower-middle and middle class to the necessarily urban upper and middleclass with special emphasis on the NRIs. But a simplistic critic of Bollywood will not be sufficient to understand the operatives and the cultural ramifications. Bollywood in the globalized context calls for an overall understanding of the global-local nexus and viewing glocalization as a mode of resistance as well as accommodation. According to many scholars, firstly, the new Bollywood has become a site of reconfiguration of locality and local subjects in the newly evolved cultural dimension under the economic liberalization. Secondly it served as an accounting for the new cultural trends and forms emerging at the intersections of the global and the local. Thirdly, it is also a mode of countering the frequently expressed fear of homogenization which becomes a part and parcel of the global flows of labor, culture or capitals. Lastly, Bollywood has become a recognition of the fact that when new ideas, objects, audio-visuals, spacial dimensions, social crisis, practices and performances are transplanted to another space, they bear the marks of history as well as undergo a process of cultural, political and ideological transcreations. In cinema, with the continuous production of global images of Indian residents, these different images, ideas and meanings attain faith and dependence on the highly varied local space s. Fashion, Location, Music, Choreography and Language – the Global Desi Bollywood Global Fashion, Local Sensibilities Not until the year of economic liberalization, India started being recognized as one of the most important fashion destinations of the world. Dresses were always being designed by the fashion designers for the Bollywood stars, but only recently have clothes become signed artifacts, and Bollywood styles and fashions become themselves separately marketable. Since liberalization, international fashion magazines like Verve, Vogue, and Elle publish Indian editions feature glossy photographs of Bollywood stars and models with various merchandising objects and designer dresses. The newly emerging fashion designers like Sabyasachi Mukherjee, Manish Malhotra, Wendell Rodricks, Ritu Kumar, Ritu Beri and many others had started participating in the most important international fashion shows at Berlin, Venice, New York and Rome became huge names in Bollywood. 1990s, especially the later part of the decade saw a shift in the way film costumes and clothes were being designed and produced. Indian v iewers were no more secluded into Doordarshan anymore, and hence the satellite television network threw a plethora of glitz, glamour and notions of beauty was undergoing a rapid change among the masses. Therefore, filmmakers started believing that emphasis on fashion is imperative in a successful marketing of Bollywood film. According Wilkinson-Weber, who has done extensive investigation into Indian fashion, notes Indian styles in film have themselves been subject to a fashion reinterpretation, contemporary designers have incorporated both their own designs, and designer label clothes from international markets into the looks they create for their actors. It is interesting to note that earlier in Hindi films of the 70s till the late 80s, there used to be a vamp, the ‘fallen’ woman, who would lead an immoral life and was supposed to be a violation of the traditional beliefs of India. These vamps personified the urban and modern tastes of society and ‘the temptations and corruptions of anti-Indianess where being Indian meant identifying with, and committing to, constructions of tradition and virtue. This is the woman who would wear revealing dresses, and almost all the designer dresses with innovative fashion statements including fashion accessories and make ups were invested on this character. But with liberalization the tradition was ‘won’ by the fashion world, we see that there is no necessity of these vamps who would exhibit the fashionable dresses. Instead of the vamps, the new Bollywood heroines became the site of the sensual body to exhibit a host of fashion materials. These materials are not only limited to Western flamboyant designs, but also includes expensive traditional wears like lehngaas and sarees. India embraced the global trends and reinvented its traditional culture with the irresistible waves of globalization and soon Bollywood became more cosmopolitan than the other regional language films. Western clothing was no more a sign of anti-Indianness and was no longer marginalized by the audience. Bollywood Space and its Hybridity Globalization, in other words, is a world economic integration, hastened by global treaties and transnational organizations such as WTO. This economic network has facilitated the functioning of a market-driven and advertiser supported consumption in an unprecedented scale. Immigration facilities, cheap air tickets and facilitation of infrastructural support for Bollywood in foreign lands allowed easy mobility in travel and tourism among the bourgeoning Indian middleclass as well as the Indian film crews. Not only the shooting became easy in foreign locations, it served a two-fold function to satisfy the desires of the two broad ranges of Bollywood audience – the first and the most lucrative film business is done in foreign lands, therefore the NRIs became the prime target for the films so that they can relate themselves with the known landscapes with Indian oneness on the screen; the second, now less important, being the Indian audience whose desire and longing for a picture p erfect and almost an ‘ideal state’ could be fulfilled on the screen with the exotic spaces of desire they can seldom visit. Moreover, the Indian government does not put any major tax on profits generated in foreign currencies which an Indian can bring home. This was a huge advantage for Bollywood for overseas business. The popular location shootings at Kashmir, Ooty and Shimla soon changed to the Swiss Alps, London and New York. In Karan Johar’s multi star-cast film, Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Ghum, one might notice that in a single song sequence Shahrukh Khan and Kajol were in Delhi, Switzerland, Cairo, and London. But shifts in cinematic locations have the tendency to create a sense of placelessness, even homelessness and alienation. While audiences recognize the allure of foreign locations, they also feel some loss and dissolution of long-held identities associated with spaces. But although there are these shifts in location, it does not delude its audience as the meanings of narratives remain irreducibly fixed to local meanings with local stories constantly revisited and even reinvented. These foreign locations, whether it is Mahesh Manjrekar’s Kaante, Karan Johar’s Kabhi Alvida Na Kehna or Kal Ho Na Ho, Rakesh Roshan’s Kaho Na Pyar Hain or Farhan Akhtar’s Dil Chahta Hain or Don, Bollywood films are always domesticated with Bollywood stars who speak in Hindi in foreign lands or for that matter we can hardly see any native of the foreign land making an entry in the actual story line. The international settings do not confer the fact that the local crisis or the local cultures will find its way in the Bollywood narratives unlike Hollywood. On the contrary, these foreign spaces will be necessarily Indianized and beautiful exotic locations become a part of the world the globalized Indians inhabit. No matter wherever the place might be, Bollywood will be always telling a story about an Indian girl and a boy and an Indian family with their entire traditional ramifications held intact. Bollywood responds to both global and local imperatives by exporting Indianness to exoticized backdrops. Music Hindi cinema is known for its music, not as an integral part of the narrative or the story line, but as a separate entity. According to noted filmmaker, Shyam Benegal: For Indian films, for their very sustenance, songs are very important. But that is because for any kind of Indian entertainment, particularly community entertainment, music and songs were essential features. But songs in an Indian film does not make it a musical. In India film, songs interrupt, sometimes they are part of a story†¦they are interludes. Hindi film songs were dominated by mushaira, ghazal, and qawali traditions with emphasis on Indian Classical Music. Songs were composed in the traditional Indian technique – based on ragas and tunes which were accorded to the Urdu lyric poems and traditional Hindi language. One thing should be noted here is that unlike the West, which thrives on a history of rich visual culture, Indian tradition thrives on an aural culture and therefore songs become an integral part of any representation. Globalized Bollywood adheres to the primacy of song and dance per se, and also to the function of the musical parts within the film as spaces of displaying sexual fantasies and a situation of eroticized communication. But the way in which the Hindi film music is composed now (based on chords rather than ragas as was the case previously) and packaged has undergone a huge change – instead of the classical base, most of the music has shifted to groovy hip-hops and incorporated various for ms of popular and rock arrangements. The reason seems to be very interesting, as Bollywood film music industry faced a big challenge in the 1990s with the advent of the newly found Indie popular music with the likes of bands like Silk Route and Euphoria, and individual stars like Lucky Ali, Kay Kay and a host of talented artists. As mentioned earlier, globalization has made Bollywood more corporatized and aggressive marketing strategies became its key areas to achieve financial success. These independent artists were appropriated by Bollywood – firstly to crush the competition and obliterate the threat of an unprecedented challenge put forward by the indie pop culture, but also to enrich film music with the inputs of these new trends and innovation of a music industry nurtured outside the film world. Language Globalized Bollywood has also witnessed a metamorphosis in the arena of spoken language. Usage of English has become more obvious than Hindi colloquial itself. Since independence the influence of Persian and Urdu was prominent in Hindi films. But globalization turned the spoken language into a hybrid one – a mix of Hindi and English. This trend was even reflected in the titles of the films which released after the 90s. This hybrid language has become the most common trend among the urban youth which has been infested to and by the plethora of glocal culture in satellite television channels which runs 24*7 in every household in India. Madhav Prasad in his essay ‘This thing called Bollywood’ finds out that the nationalist ideology of India was held together historically by a metalanguage which could properly articulate one nationalist sentiment. Prasad argues that in a globalized India, English provides the ideological coordinates of the new world of Bollywood films. According to him, English phrases and proverbs are liberally used to construct a web of discourse which the characters inhabit. Choreography An overlooked arena in Bollywood is the field of choreography. Through the ages, Bollywood choreography has gained considerable amount of sophistication and respect. This has also its influence drawn from the satellite television programs on dance competitions like Boogie Woogie and international and national music videos in channels belonging to a multinational corporation who gained their access in India only after globalization. Choreography in Hindi films, which was taken just as a time pass and was taken in the least serious way by the viewers, suddenly became a spectacle with huge investments and taking highly skilled artists and chorographers as item numbers. Another change that had taken place in globalized Bollywood films is a matter of a far more serious and economic concern – the accompanying dancers in Hindi films used to belong to the groups of junior artists, most of whom were from lower middle-class and slum areas. But suddenly this changed with Subhash Ghaiâ₠¬â„¢s Taal, which introduced the famous dancer Shyamak Davar and his group which replacing the former setting of junior artists as dancers. Accompanying dancers in contemporary Bollywood evolved from junior artists to highly skilled and upper class professional dancers, courtesy to a number of modern dancing schools. This has further evolved to foreign dance troops who come as packages with other facilities when a Bollywood film is shot abroad. Since the early 1990s, there has been an explosion in the number of foreign women dancers who are used as extras for the song and dance sequences in films (Mumbai film industry’s demand for foreign dancers has brought a large number of women from Eastern Europe and Russia). Since 1960, Hindi films’ nationalism through the role of women represented Western women as primarily ‘immoral and sexually accessible to the Indian male’ and as embodiment of unbridled sexuality. The trend is still continuing today and the value judgment of women based on their sexuality and chastity is immensely significant for the audience. Indian viewers recognize the influx of these foreign women into the song and dance sequences and equate their presence with overt sexualization of film choreography. As V.Lal puts it in his essay ‘The Impossibility of the Outsider in Modern Hindi film’, over sexualization of song and dance may create a cultural threat and anxiety, but such tensions are appeased with a logic that the ‘foreign’ backup dancers can be ‘sexy’ but the ‘Indian’ heroines and heroes have to maintain the decorum of modesty and tradition. Globalization has made song sequences a site of absolute and flawless pleasure, but seldom have we talked about the particular class of junior artists, who are perished under the new liberalization aesthetics. However, maintaining the tradition-modernity and sober-obscene construct of the Bollywood notions in accord with its audience has become a conventional practice with the Indian heroines gearing up in both Western and traditional attires and participating in the same choreography with the ‘other’ cultural representations through the white women (both blonde and brunette) who wear revealing dresses and symbolize sexual ecstasy. It is of course a niche created by the globalized Bollywood according to G. Gangoly in his essay ‘Sexuality, Sensuality, and Belonging: Representations of the Anglo-Indian and the Western Women in Hindi Cinema’. It is a curious fact that the integration of MTVization, especially the beach party reality shows like Grind and due to new trends in advertisements with star endorsements has further eased the tension of this stance of traditional sanctity in contemporary Bollywood films. Heroines are more global than ever, sexually more liberated than the previous years and the women characters are gaining more independence in terms of economic and social structure as the space of unfolding of the narrative is mostly New York, London or any other first world city. We see the evolution of super stars like Katrina Kaif, whose very presence reminds us that our women of desire in cinema is an Indian who exhibit and combine the beauties and characteristics of a white woman too. Globalization has embraced Bollywood cinema not to impose the global cultures in the Indian terrain neither to challenge the cultural archetypes, nor to question the nationalist feelings into jeopardy. On the contrary, the national image and the desire of the nation as an emerging global power under the umbrella of the United States is reconfigured and consolidated in a new way. Bollywood through its films have invested a vision of portraying itself to the world as a global superpower, not from the military point of view, but as a highly skilled and updated human resource tank whose representations are manifested through the protagonists and their friends inside, and mostly outside the country. But this is not the only agenda that Bollywood has – the cultural ramifications and re-endorsements of the familial emotions along with the Non-residential Indian community feelings are of prime importance. As Bourden points out, with the changes in media production, consumption, and ex hibition, ‘locality is produced as one’s sense of difference from the global, but the new locality is no longer a spontaneous expression of given, long-held local traditions. Glocalization has helped Bollywood not only to link the spaces far and broad stretching to different continents, but also to invent the localities which are hybrid in nature, but national in culture. An Indian audience in contemporary times aspires to be a global citizen, and Bollywood becomes a key cultural impetus through which global is constructed locally just as the local is constructed globally. 3. OBJECTIVE i. To understand the cultural ramifications of the terms ‘globalization’ and what we understand as ‘Bollywood’ in particular reference to Mumbai (previously Bombay) film industry. ii. To understand the various impacts of globalization on Hindi films not resulting in mutation of the Hindi film cultural but a new coexistence of hybridity. iii. To trace the impact of the new ‘glocal’ or hybrid culture on various aspects of Hindi popular cinema challenged by the ever changing Indian media under globalization. 4. SUMMARY With the new market liberalization policies, Indian media scenario underwent a rapid change in the way it reached to its audience. Waves of change in the Indian media industry penetrated into the Hindi film industry as well. This marked a departure of the Hindi popular cinema from the way it operated in the eighties and deliberately changed the way its ways both as an industry and as a commercial product as well. Hindi popular cinema, preferably termed as Bollywood, under the new global ethics became international in production and global in consumption, at the sometime maintaining and reiterating facets of what we may call Indian culture (mostly limited to the upper caste Hindu North Indian culture). This may be termed as ‘glocalization’ which means global ideas with local stories. The new Bollywood also came with the over-arching presence of the NRIs who gained importance in the new Bollywood of globalization. With the overseas business and opportunity of this certainl y influenced and changed the way in which Hindi popular incorporated locations, songs, choreography and a number merchandizing items starting from fashion, accessories to other commercial products. FAQs: 1. As a term, has Bollywood got anything to do with Hollywood? Bollywood as a term is a mixture of ‘Bombay’, the earlier name of Mumbai and Hollywood. Linking the mainstream Hindi film industry with the name of the world’s biggest film industry not only become a feeling of pride but also a tribute to the artists and technicians of Hollywood for the dexterity of work. 2. If globalization is an economic aspect, why does it influence the cultural aspect as is the case with Bollywood? As already mentioned, if we follow the classical Marxist approach, most of the times the shift in the economic base influences shifts in other aspects of life – i.e. a shift in the base inevitably influences a shift in the superstructure – the structure which is placed above the base. Hence, any cultural aspect is bound to be influenced if the economic base undergoes a shift. Therefore, with the change of the nature of the market, a commercial industry like Bollywood has to respond to the market ethics and hence has to change itself accordingly. 3. What is culture industry? Culture Industry as a term was coined by the Marxists Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer belonging to the Frankfurt School. The original essay is known as Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception†, of the book Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), where they proposed that the all the representations of popular culture including radio, print television and a part of cinema are produced and reproduced standardized cultural goods just like any other manufactured good coming out of the factory whose only objective is nothing philosophical and eclectic, but generating capital. 4. How is Bollywood considered to be a culture industry? A lot of scholars refer this term to Bollywood because Bollywood is a mainstream commercial industry whose objective is also profit generation, which is more than ever in the era of globalization. 5. Why does Bollywood invest so much on narratives related to NRIs? NRIs, or non-residential Indians have gained primacy in films as characters and as audience primarily to generate a market in the overseas. It has been a trend after globalization because the restrictions and taxes which were there previously in overseas business is eased to great extent and hence the profit generation of the new Bollywood films have been easier than before. 6. Why does Bollywood shifted from the pan-Indian audience to a more specific target group of the urban elites? As India is often been imagined as a developing country, there has been a trend of converting each and every class, whether rural or urban, into ideal consumers. Logic of consumption is best found in the urban areas where products, goods and services of all levels are readily available. Moreover, the logic of development in most of the cases have become the process of expansion of urban areas where the rural population is fast being converted into urban ones. Hence, Bollywood cinema is akin to this development and the new rural-converted-urban populace has started finding meaning in the new Bollywood. Therefore, with the influx of so many products and goods, targeting the urban elite will actually incorporate the fast transforming rural population into the same group. 7. In spite of having a lot of songs, why does a Hindi film never become a musical genre? If we pay attention to the cultural history of India, it will be clear that the India has rich heritage in aural culture, unlike the visual one of the West. hence the cultural rendering of a song or ,music piece in the West is entirely different from that of the Indian subjects. so, in spite of inclusion of a number of songs into films, the film is never been perceived as a musical genre. 8. If India has accepted globalization, why do the Hindi films stick to traditional elements? Globalization has hardly anything to do with modernity or tradition. Rather, if we consider glocalization as a valid point which has a deep effect on the film industry, globalization will inspire us into exploring the new markets and plethora of products has to offer and at the same time clinging on to the roots of tradition (to the extent of discovering and rediscovering them in a new way). So more the NRIs will feature with all the elements of Western culture, more facets of traditional inputs will visible in the image reproduction of Bollywood. 9. In spite of shooting at locations far off from the homeland, the characters of the Hindi films never feel alienated and homeless. Why? Because Hindi films never involve its characters, plots and other elements with the foreign ones. Although the locales are away from home, the ethics, morality and sentiments remain Indian to the core. 10. Why is it so that the Bollywood had been forced to change itself after globalization? With the advent of open market policies, Indian media saw the rise of various television channels including film channels where the audience for the first time could watch all the films just sitting back at home. Bollywood had to turn to newer ways to attract the Indian audience who are suddenly facing the pleasures of the satellite channels, not only in terms of its production quality, but also its marketing policies.