Good advice is rarer than rubies

Ich hab zwar das Material dazu nicht, aber kennst du das Interview mit David Cronenberg und Salman Rushdie? Das ist hochspannend als Hintergrund, vor allem der untere Teil ... also der hier reinkopierte.

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Kill Me But Don't Censor Me

Cronenberg: I've had movies censored, and I realize that I could never second- guess a censor. I don't know how they think because they'll want to cut something out of my movie that I would never imagine they would.

Rushdie: I had the strange experience of becoming a subject of a movie-this appalling movie made in Pakistan called International Guerrillas. It's about the freedom fighters of Islam searching for me, trying to kill me. I'm the villain of the movie. There is a character called my name who is the author of The Satanic Verses who wears a series of appalling safari suits. And every time this guy arrives on camera there's a sort of satanic "dahh dahh." And the cameraman always looks to his feet. And there's a slow "pan" up-

C: That's a "tilt." It's a very common mistake and I get very pedantic.
R: No, I appreciate it. I would make the same pedantic correction about writing. And this guy, me, lives in what appears to be an island in the Philippines, protected by what appears to be the Israeli army. And various members of these Islamic radicals were arrested by these Jewish soldiers and are brought to the "me" character who tortures them, has them tied up and cut about with swords. And at the end of the film I actually get killed by the Holy Book itself. The Koran appears in the sky above me and fries me with lightning.
This dreadful film is so badly made that it's actually difficult to take it too seriously, but it came to England and was banned. And I found myself in the strangest position. I'm fighting an anti-censorship fight and here's somebody banning a film which is brought about by me. It ended up with me writing to the censors here, guaranteeing that I would not take legal action against them. And telling them that I do not wish to be protected in this way.
It's a wonderful parable about how censorship doesn't work. If that film had been banned, it would have become the hottest video in town. Everybody would have seen it. Instead, it was unbanned at my request and the producers booked the biggest cinema in Bradford, which is the largest Muslim community, and nobody came. They lost a fortune, and the film just died overnight.

Whoops, I Just Converted

Cronenberg: Are you good at religion, are you religious?
Rushdie: No, I am totally without religion. I was brought up in a family where religion was just not around. And it just faded in me. However, I am very interested in it. Because if you grow up in India and you spend all your life writing about India you actually can't write about India without writing about religion.

C: Why did I read that you had converted to Islam?
R: Five years ago there was a moment when I made a stupid mistake and when I was approached by a number of British Muslims here who sort of seduced me into making some statement of support for the faith, and said that if I were to do this then in return there would be a rapid amelioration of the situation. I said very stupid things for a couple of weeks.
It's one of those things that you get seduced into for good reasons, where you think, "OK, I will show these people I am not their enemy, I want to calm things down." And that sucks you towards saying things which you shouldn't say because they happen not to be what you think, you know? Yeah.
The moment I made the statement it immediately made me feel physically sick because I felt that in some way I had lost my language. Up to that point the one thing that kept me going was that I could defend everything I said and I could talk about it in my ordinary language and not have to use any kind of special guarded phrases, you know, just talk. And suddenly I found myself in this compromised position. So very rapidly I took steps to say, "Look, this was a mistake and this is not my position, and while I'm not hostile to Muslims at large, I could not really, truthfully, call myself Muslim."

C: Sitting here talking to you, I was having trouble thinking of you as a practising, devout Muslim.
R: Basically, I was offered a deal. It became rapidly clear that it was a mistake to have made the statement and that the people I was dealing with were completely unreliable.
You see that means you'd not be a very good politician, doesn't it?

Dirty Jokes Behind the Lie

Cronenberg: You say you can you never go back to Bombay?
Rushdie: No. It's completely dreadful for me. That is the worst thing, finding it difficult to go to India is, of all the deprivations, the worst. Because, well, because I'm from there. My family is still there and my mother lives in Pakistan and I'm not allowed to go to Pakistan. I'm personally banned there.

C: That's the worst place for you to go, a Muslim country.
R: I will never go to Pakistan again, no question. But it's an indication of how trumped up this whole thing is. My mother has been living there throughout this time and there's been absolutely no trouble. You know, she hasn't had a rude phone call.

C: Why not? Because you believe that in the streets-
R: Because all of the people are not like that. She goes to the bazaar and people say, "How is your son? Isn't it dreadful what's happening?"

C: Oh? Now that's so interesting to hear.
R: But that's the reality.

C: The image you have of it is that she would be stoned in the streets.
R: I know. People say, "These crazy Muslims, we couldn't stop them, and they're bastards." One of the things that's not given a lot of attention is how much Muslim support for me there's been.

C: Well, that's encouraging to hear.
R: The thing called Islamism is not the same thing as Islam. This political thing which we call fundamentalism, everybody is scared stiff of it. It is not a religious movement, it's a political fascist movement which happens to be using a certain kind of religious language.

C: It's like the Christian fundamentalists in the States.
R: Sure, but because there is less knowledge in the West of what's happening in these countries, there's a tendency not to understand that this is a political movement, a tendency to say that it is a spontaneous outpouring of the true religious feelings of the people.

C: Yes, I know that people do think that.
R: Yes, and also to not notice the fact that the people who are most oppressed by these movements are Muslims. That's to say the people most oppressed by the Iranian regime are the people of Iran.

Ultimately it's easy to think that they also got what they deserved, that somehow this is an expression of what they really want.
But there's no such thing as a homogeneous culture which can demand not to be criticized. Iran, for example, is famous as the place in which the most pornographic jokes about the prophet are made.

C: Really?
R: Iran is famous as being a place with dirty stories, dirty religious stories. It's their culture. No culture is one thing.

C: If someone were doing that now in Iran, under these-
R: Oh, it would get wiped out.

C: Now they would.
R: But it's still in the streets and in people's houses et cetera. It's an irreverent culture. My writing has always come out of that idea of the mixture, the kind of idealized, mongrel truth. We should avoid at all costs any pedigree version of the truth.

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Und hier audio gibt es audio-interviews: auch echte Schmankerl, wenn ihr einen internetzugang habt und du die Schüler mal hören lassen kannst (leider keine kopierbaren mp3s).

Besonders interessant für dich dürfte "the issue of place, of belonging and not belonging" sein.

Kennst du den Film von Hanif Kureishi (Autor von "My beautiful laundrette) "My Son the Fanatic (1994)" ?? Die screenplays zu diesem Film und zu anderen seiner Filme (beautiful laundrette, London kills me, Sammie and Rosie get laid) gibt es hier [Anzeige] und sie sind alle gut für dein Thema: Auszüge, Auszüge mit Film, oder einige ganz lesen.
Bei screenplays ist das Rollenspiel ja quasi als Methode intergriert und da kann man wirklich viel machen.

Achja: Orwell's "Shooting an Elephant" ist dir sicher bekannt, der Link zum Text trotzdem nochmal hier

Viele geniale Unterrichtsideen zu diesem Text und anderen postcolonial themes (nicht nur India) findest du
hier .

Lieber Gruß
Meike

Liebes Huhn
Einen Text habe ich, der allerdings nur sehr speziell EINE Facette des Lebens indischer Frauen beleuchtet - aber daraus kann man ja Rückschlüsse ziehen. Oder du arbeitest mit Vorbereitung durch andere Texte.

Zitat

Woman: India’s NewEndangered Species?

SARITA SARVATE, Mar 18, 2006
A recent study published in the British medical journal Lancet claims that about half-a-million girl babies are aborted in India every year. In this study Canadian and Indian researchers, who collaborated on a national survey of 1.1 million households with 133,738 recorded births, concluded that between 590,000 and 740,000 girls were aborted in India in 1997, creating a severe imbalance between female and male populations. As a result of this trend, in 1991, the female-male ratio fell to 945 women for every 1,000 men in the Indian population. The ratio dropped even further, to 927 females per 1,000 males in 2001.

Without any outside intervention, the number of female births always exceeds the number of male births worldwide.

The new figures are particularly troubling in the light of the fact that a law was passed in 1994 in India banning the use of ultrasound for detecting the sex of a baby. In a 2000 decision, the Indian Supreme Court reaffirmed the rule and made state governments responsible for its implementation.

The Lancet study addresses only one facet of the problem. During a visit to India in 2001, I interviewed government officials, social workers, and women’s groups, who informed me about a loophole in the law. Perfectly legal high-tech methods were replacing the use of amniocentesis and subsequent abortions for selecting a baby’s sex, experts warned me, particularly among the middle and upper classes.

In the new millennium, Indian medicine has been on the cutting edge to determine the sex of a baby. Dr. Malpani in Mumbai became an early leader, perfecting a technique called pre-implantation genetic diagnosis (PGD), consisting of in-vitro fertilization followed by a biopsy on the fetus to determine its sex. During an interview, Malpani admitted that in most cases, he implanted only male embryos, as requested by his clients.

In the last five years, a wide variety of gender selection techniques have gained popularity among the growing middle class in India. Advertisements in newspapers and magazines are common, as are signs for fertility clinics.

There is every reason to believe therefore that the Lancet study underestimates the total loss of female babies in India each year.

In the last five years, PGD and other baby sex-selection techniques have also gone mainstream in America. Choosing the sex of a baby has been euphemistically labeled “family balancing,” and blessed by the Christian right and medical ethicists.

Since the United States does not ban such procedures, kits and treatments for pre-selecting the baby’s sex have been widely advertised in American newspapers and magazines. So much so that in March 2005, 60 Minutes aired a glowing report, interviewing a mother, who, after three sons, wanted a daughter. The program made no reference to the international dimensions of the story, nor did it dwell on the fact that in many countries, such techniques are banned.

And 60 Minutes omitted to mention a crucial aspect, that a disproportionate number of advertisements for the technology appear in publications catering to Indian immigrants. Not coincidentally, a large proportion of practitioners of such technology in the United States also happen to be doctors of Indian origin.

Sociologists in India and elsewhere have offered the usual explanations for the loss of 5 million or more female children over the last 10 years in India through selective abortions alone. Dowries and the resulting preference for male children are the culprits.

The Lancet study also observed that in families where the first child was a girl, the ratio of girls to boys among second children was 759 girls per 1,000 boys—a reflection of the efforts made by families to ensure that at least one of their children was male.

And herein lies the crux of the problem, in India as well as in the Indian immigrant population in America. Indian Americans may not choose the sex of their first baby, but chances are that if they already have a girl they will undergo some effort to conceive a boy the next time.

What does all this say about the future of female Homo sapiens? Selective gender selection might become quite the rage in coming decades, as medical procedures become available to increasing proportions of Indians and Chinese, creating a major gender imbalance on the planet.

While politicians and feminists in the United States engage in the same old debate on “choice,” as demonstrated in the recent Senate confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Sam Alito, there continues a raging controversy among Indian feminists on abortion rights, which they do not view as a symbol of women’s liberation but as a vehicle for subjugation of women. And while American media publishes heartwarming stories about women blessed by a child of a chosen gender through high-tech means such as PGD, Indian feminists lobby their government for a complete ban on such procedures.

In this age of globalization, America cannot afford to practice moral parochialism. It is time the United States engaged in a dialogue with the international community - perhaps with help of the United Nations—about the ethics of gender selection via abortion as well as via high-tech means. It is time to establish international guidelines on both or risk the gender balance of humans being altered forever.

Sarita Sarvate writes commentaries for Pacific News Service and KQED. A collection of her writings can be found at www.saritasarvate.com.

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Aufgabenstellung: (4 Gruppen, davon je zwei themengleiche)

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Group1: Your are experts on gender questions and you are members of the UN. You will be intwerviewed about the situation of women in India. By anticipating the questions that might be asked, prepare possible answers.

Zitat

Group 2: You are employees of a newspaper. Your next article will be about the situation of women in India. For this article, you will interview experts of the UN. Use the text for the preparation of your questions to the experts.

Je zwei Experten gehen nach der Vorbereitung (= 40 Minuten für Lesen und Fragn diskutieren) in je eine andere Gruppe, wo sie das Interview führen und einer Notizen dazu macht (15 Min).

Im Plenum werden die Fragen und Antworten verglichen und gemeinsam die Struktur für einen Artikel festgehalten. Artikel schreiben ist dann HA für alle.

Lieber Gruß
Meike