Bookshelf

Bollywood Weddings: Dating, engagement and marriage in Hindu America
by Kavita Ramdya
Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2010

This engaging book begins with Ramdya's own wedding, when she married a Muslim man from Trinidad. The ceremony was polycultural, drawing from a variety of heritages, but was grounded in the liturgy of Islam. Her friends asked her why she did not have a Hindu wedding. That question began a journey that led to interviews with twenty couples and – oh, so hard! – trips to many, many weddings. In so doing, Ramdya examines how the trap of 'authenticity' recreates the orthodoxy of gender, even as the young couples shudder at such practices as kanya-daan. The wedding is framed around the 'ethnic objects' that are essential to the ceremony, such as the saris and the fire, the horse and the food: this is cultural studies that examines culture as commodity, weddings as a key institution of modern capitalism. (Vijay Prashad)

Life in a Day
directed by Kevin MacDonald
produced by Ridley Scott
Scott Free/YouTube, 2011

Life in a Day begins at night, because that's when the new day begins. It then proceeds to offer the most ticklish ruminations on the human experience, whether a viewer wants to mull them over or not. Filmed over the course of last 24 July but formally released this 24 July, the film is the result of nearly 80,000 amateur-to-professional submissions from 140 countries documenting a single day in the lives of the filmmakers. These 4500 raw hours were posted on YouTube, leaving to the director and producer the onerous task of wading through, editing and reassembling into a coherent whole this mess of the trivial masquerading as the sublime.