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popculturebuffet · 1 year ago

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It's Not the Years, It's the Mileage Finale: Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (Comission for WeirdKev27)

Hello all you happy archelogists and welcome to the final installment of my Indiana Jones Retrospective, It's Not the Years, It's the Milleage. For those just joining us for the epic conculsion, i've covered all four previous Indy films over the past few months, from the good with great action set pieces, iconic lines, and deft character work, to the bad with the uncomfortable amount of brown face, temple of dooms theme park version of india and support of colonolisim, and Crystal Skulls sterotpyical 'savage tribesman", to the just plain weird with aborted ideas such as a haunting in scottland, a chess game to the death, sun wukong vs indiana jones, and an out and out alien invasion which Indy makes out during suprising no one.

IT's been one long, LONG journey and today.. it ends, as does the film franchise. With Dial of Destiny. Dial is the main reason we did this: a fresh fim with ford, with a fresh director in Logan maestro James Mangold, a final chapter for the ages.. and it has been recived with a resounding

Yeah while there was some hype for this film from Fans of Mangold or Indy (Of which i'm now both) it's now gotten to the point Wikipedia has out and out labeled it a box office bomb and Naturally the failure of this film has been taken with grace and restraint by the internet

It hasn't helped that Indy has come out in a summer with plummeting box office from usual money makers, so people are only more on their "Why aren't people seeing these films" kick. When really the reasons aren't new. We have "Doing the same shit a diffrent day instead of going with what was new and working " (Transformers rise of the beasts), "Another film outboxing it" (Elemental), "The company behind it simply not promoting it at all" (Ruby Gilman, which I intend to review at some point), " or "Oopsie we hired a pedophile as our leading actor, have no idea where we were taking this franchise when we started this film, and our company is ran by an evil overlord no one likes whose actively made the media landscape worse ever since he took over, better hope our promotoinal tactics work..."

The issues aren't new, their simply finding hitting people over the head.. and that's what happened here. Indy had an uphill battle: I was only invested at first because James Mangold was directing it and Logan is still one of the best superhero movies ever made. I got more invested thanks to this retrospective. Given Disney's slipshod treamant of star wars and terrible treatment of last jedi as well as the mcu being a mess right now, it's not a huge leap that many audiences really didn't want to gamble on ANOTHER disney live action movie that just looked okay, no matter how much Phoebe Waller Bridge or Antonio Bandareas it had. While it's sad as I honestly don't think the film deserved THIS much of a bomb.. I can't blame audiences for waiting for Disney Plus. We simply live in an era now where most people have tons of streamers or will get one for a month to watch one movie and anything else they've caught up on. We're simply entering an era where having a big brand name isn't a guarantee and in this case can be a curse if that name is disney. Big franchises can work, see Spider-Verse and Scream VI making great money, but you have to have something to offer.

So come with me under the cut as we see if Indy has just that or is best left in the past

MASSIVE SPOILERS AHOYHOY

When I'm Gone, He's Gone

As you'd expect, Lucas still wanted to make a 5th film after Skull, with Speilberg and Ford on board as always. This time though..

Lucas himself went to the press saying he wanted to do something new and Speilberg was stuck in the past... which I translate as Lucas once again went kinda nuts on the premise while , much like after Temple of Doom, Speilberg wanted something a tad more grounded to avoid making the same mistake twice. It comes off as the two just could never quite agree on what to do and eventually.. decided to let the franchise move on without him, selling it and the rest of Lucasfilm to Disney. Disney naturally wanted an indy film right away and after getting the distribution rights one year later in 2023.. it took them a decade.

Yeahhh while we got the sequel trilogy pretty fast in hollywood time it took a good decade for Indy to put his hat on. At first there were rumors floated about about recasting, then it was settled on ford, then Speilberg was set to direct and the film proceded to go through a ton of writers, from Crystal Skull's david koepp

And even Dan Fogelman of This is Us royalty was floated as one of the writers. The film also got delayed thanks to Speilbergs work on Ready Player One and the Post, before he eventually stepped off all together. He claimed it was to pass it on to a fresh director, but it really feels like his heart wasn't in it anymore, and it was best someone whose heart was took the lead.

Enter James Mangold, director of The Wolverine, Logan and Kicker of ass. Mangold was a solid choice and my book and along with his usual co-writers Jez and John Henry Butterworth, who I assure you are real people but cannot assure you aren't old timey prospectors sent forward in time, hashed out the script.

Casting went smoothly, as did filiming, with the only hiccup being production's start being delayed because of COVID. They shot in morocco, england, ireland and spain, along with the us as you'd expect. Speilberg wasn't entirely detached as he still advised and watched dalies, ultimately loving the final product. So now we can actually look at that product let's start with how it writes Indy himself. The Mileage Adds Up

One of the things that made me not really enjoy Doom or Crystal.. was a lack of character work. Indy was about the same as when he started the adventure in contrast to Raiders and Last Crusade taking him on a wonderful character journey, in the former getting his passion back and in the later reconcliing with his dad. Dial of Destiny dosen't reach those highs, but I still think it does a decent job. The opening.. is okay detailing Indy having an adventures in the last day sof the third reich, setting up both Helna's Dad and our big bad, as well as Archimedes Dial, basied on the real life Antyhkiera Mechanism. I really do love the dial as a plot device as it's a departure, being the only one of the five to not involve a god of some sort, and yes the alien counts. It's just a time machine a famous philospher made. It's still fucking neat, I mean IT'S A TIME MACHINE A FAMOUS PHILSOPHER MADE, but it's a bit more grounded while still being pretty damn nifty.

So while the intro is mostly.. eh for me, what it does really well... is contrast the indy we know.. with where he is in 1969: Unlike Crystal Skull, which glossed over the massive amount of time passed, here were with an indy who feels both his age.. and that he's been left behind by the world. That time has taken everything from him: his friends, his father, his marriage.. and his son. He's left to yell at the neighbors, go to a class that dosen't pay attention and have a retirment party he clearly dosen't want. Granted his retirment does feel like a missed opportunity as wikipedia mentioned it pre-release as being forced out due to speaking out against operation paper clip, something that I either missed.. or more likely simply ISN'T in the film. It's a real shame, the idea is great it's just not present. This creates a really intriguing Parallel: Indy at the start of the last adventure of his we'll see is a broken down man whose years of adventuering have left a mark on him, who is estranged from Marion, has not a ton to live for, and is clearly only loosely holding it together. And the Indy we met in Raiders.. is a broken down man whose years of adventuring left a mark on him, is estranged from marion, has not a ton to live for and is clearly only loosely holding it together. The diffrence is how tired Indy is. In his late 30's he's beaten a bit and reduced to graverobbing.. but the minute he gets a real assignemnt int he grail, he jumps to it. He has his job, he has his friendship with marcus, and he's able to fix things with marion. He's not completely gone, he's just lost. Indy in Dial... has watched all his friends and his son, more on that in a minute, die, his marriage fall apart, and his job slip out under him. Without his job.. he's a man without a purpose.

This also ironically creates another Scrooge McDuck parallel, another bit of symmetry and one I didn't plan on till I started writing this and thought of the story: Indy reminds me a lot of Scrooge in the final part of Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck. Both are seasoned adventueres who have either pushed away anyone they have left or lost them and feel they just have nothing left but to slowly rot away.

And like Scrooge it takes a bolt of inspiration from the new generation after him to get Indy back in the game. In this case it's the highlight of the film, Helena Shaw, played by the wonderful, funderful fleabag, Phoebe Waller-Bridge. WB likely dosen't need any introduction but just in case she was showrunner of the successful and inventive stage show turned amazon prime show fleabag, showran killing eve and in general is pretty delightful. So it's no huge suprise she's great as Helena Shaw, daughter of Marcus Indy's sidekick for the intro who became obessed with our titular macguffin, Archemedis Dial, which can travel through time some time, though not to the end of all man kind. Helena is a neat character in that they managed to make her distinct while still giving her enough similarties to indy to serve well as his shadow, his ghost of sins past, him in his prime. She's also a brilliant archelogist, has a kid sidekick like indy did in temple of doom with Teddy Kumar (Ethann Isidoore), sells priceless artifacts for a profit, has a messy love life, kicks plenty of ass, and tries to command every room she's in. What helps seperate them is their demeanor: Indy is gruff, snarky and surly. While Helena can snark with the best of them, she's fast talking, fast thinking, and tends to use charm as much as the old Indy Guile both heroes posses. The main diffrence is rather than sell to museums, she sells to private collectors...

Okay the REAL difference is that she's only in it for the money while Indy at least, on some level, cared about the history even at his lowest. Helena just sees all her father could do and all she learned from being around him before his passing as a way to get. Once again like Indy.. she had a father who cared more about some big treasure than her child.. and a godfather who cared more about what was going on in his life than ever checking up on her. She's a person whose been left to her own devices and feels she's doing just fine.. but honestly could be putting her talents to better use. Maybe not in a school like indy, but she could help return artifacts to their countries... probably still for a pretty penny, but not just to some random asshole to sit in his den.

You can tell dealing with her just makes Indy feel even more tired, which is somehow possible after all he's been through. He's once again seeing a ghost of his past and this time can't seem to get it through her head. When she celebrates shortly after his friend Renaldo dies, he has to sharply remind her. Nothing seems to get through to her.. till we get to THAT scene. Probably the best scene of the film. The climax is awesome.. but it's this one moment. On a boat at night, Helena asks Indy what he'd do with the dial, clearly thinking some grand adventure.. instead Indy: I'd stop my son from enlisting Helena: And how would you do that? Indy: I would tell him that he would die, that his mother would be overcome with a grief so intense that his father would be unable to console her, and that it would end their marriage. The sheer PAIN Ford conveys during that monologue.. may be the finest acting he's ever done. You can just FEEL Indy's loss; his son is gone, his marriage is torn, and he blames himself for both. It gives a horrible pathos to why he's so broken down. Both developments.. coudl've been really cheap. With how much everyone but me seems to hate mutt, and how rightly no one can stand shia suprise these days, most were expecting..

Instead Mutt's death is used as the catalyst for Indy's slow spiral into dispair. He would've been happy in retirment.. but he lost his son, his wife.. he's a man truly with nothing left he feels. And while he gets some old spark back unlike Scrooge.. he's fighting it every step. He dosen't want an adventure, he dose'nt want anything but his son back, and he knows damn well that even if the dial could... the sad truth is it likely has some horrible cost to it. The grail gave eternal life but bound you to a spot. The Skull gave you the knowledge of an unknowable alien god, but drove you mad. The arc killed anyone who looked. If the Dial even works... he knows it can't bring his son back, and he's only going after it because it's better in a museum than in the hands of Nazis. We also see a change in Helena. She goes from following Indy's lead out of nececity, to seeing his point, to seeing the beauty of the world instead of just the dollar signs. She still wants the money.. but she starts to see the beauty in history instead of the dollar. I also like that this isn't easy on Teddy, who sees her postive changes as coming between him and his surrogate mom, when really she fully intends to stick with Teddy no matter what and shows nothing but loyalty.. and in the end.. they dont' really finish that arc

I like Teddy a lot, and I wish this had more of a bow on it, though we do get him taking down a nazi and trapping him to drown and later getting into a dogfight. Teddy slaps is what i'ms aying> He dosen't have a ton of deep character to explore, but he's fucking great.

This all really cumulates in the climax.. which is so great i'd rather save it for after we cover one last major character, our antagonist. Our big bad is Mads Mikkelsen as Jurgen Voller, a thereoticain who wants the dial. At first Indy assumes, as most of the audience would that Voller simply wants the dial, which he's shown to obess over to win the war for hitler. Turns out Voller's plan is more complex. We see in the intro how Voller is the ONLY one who both sees the dial's value among the nazi's and the writing on the wall: Hitler is almost gone, he fucked them over. It's over. And thus the horror of Voller isn't like with Thot , at the giant horrifying nazi machine and all their power, and more at evil allowed to hide in plain sight. At a society who forgives horrible people because their useful. Voller got a free pass thanks to operation paperclip.. and the film shows while that idea got us tons of advances including space flight.. it came at the cost of giving horrible people real power and influence. The president is outright giving voller a MEDAL. And he hasn't changed: a truly chilling bit has him talking to a black bellhop delivering meal and asking where he came from.. and dismissing him saying he came from america. Voller is every bit the white supremacist monster he ever was, he's completely loyal to the idea of the nazi's. .just not to hitler. Voller's whole plan isn't to help hitler.. but to take him out, replace him and have someone compitent win. And he only gets as fara s he does because the goverment willingly works with him, gives him agents, goes after Helena and the dial. They know what he his but fully aid and abet him. Sure they eventually realize he's gone rogue, that his pet agent is entirely in his pocket.. but they don't turn on him till far too late and with one of their great agents dead. Concidentaly I feel Agent Mason is wasted: she's the calm rational agent.. but she's also the only major black character in the film and gets killed by a nazi. That's.. entirely fucked up and while I suspect inteitonally fucked up it just dosen't work for me.

Voller is also once again, much like with Belloc, an evil mirror of indy: Both are geniuses who adore history.. but one's a good person despite being gruff while one seems harmless when we first meat him but is actually a total monster. Mads does a great job showing just how evil the guy is without going over the top. Voller is determind to change history... and he does.. just not how he wanted to.

This Ain't 1933!

The climax.. is fucking awesome. Like Crystal Skull it goes beyond what the series had done before, if not more so. It's arguably even MORE over the top. But it works. For those who haven't seen the film... INDY GOES BACK IN TIME. The dial DOES indeed work.... but it's set up to ONLY go back to this point. Helena points out the idea of "loaded decks' earlier.. and realizes the dial is one. Archimedes only left it behind to create a stable time loop.

Indy going back into actual history is nuts, entirely and my jaw dropped at it.. but it's so damn fun. Our heroes not only have to escape the plain and get the dial back after it drops onto the coast, but survive the Siege of Syracuse, the roman invasion that eventaully resulted in Archimedes end. So we have two planes flying overhead, arrows everywhere and nazis versus romans. It's over the top but not in a way that really undermines the franchise, and frankly as what's intended to be the final act of indy ever, it's a fitting finale: the man whose explored history in the present.. gets to LITERALLY go to the past for his final adventure. I do get how not everyone will agree, and it won't work for everybody, this may be a bit tooo over the top, but I love it and feel it nicely ties up everyone's character arcs.

For Voller he gets to join history.. but instead of "fixing" it like he wanted he dies horribly and is forgotten to history only the "dragon" (his palne" is left.. and cleverly foreshadowed earlier when Teddy watches a puppet show. His nazi's all die and it's glorious to watch nazi after nazi go down from arrows or our two heroes escaping the plane while teddy takes the rest down with the help of a hapless pilot.

We then get the payoff for both Helena and Indy, as Indy gives the dial to archimedes.. and plans to stay. After all we established he's lost everything... why would he go back? He'll die soon.. but he's cconvinced he'll die soon back in the present. It's Helena who'se ultimately changed realizing both the value of history.. and ultimately the movie's moral: you can't change the past, but you can live for today. Helena can't change her awful upbringing or the things she's done.. but she can be better. And Indy can't save his son from death, save archimedes from death or be a better husband to marion during the greving process.. but he can be better to her and still live now. He still has so much to offer. He taught helena to love history and to try and be better. He gave his son a better life even if it was sadly cut short. He can be better. And when he can't be convinced the easy way she proves she's fully earned her way to being indy's succesor and just clubs him and takes him back (the dial has to go back with them as archimedes needs to make his own). The end scene also mostly works for me: Indy is back at his apartment.. but finds he's not alone as when he woke up there last time: Not only has Helena forgiven him, having realized much like Indy himself that warts and all, he's family, but Sallah, who I haven't gotten to talk about is here. Sallah is great in this film, not only helping Indy when he needs to lay low but enocuraging his friend it's not over. It's also nice to see Indy helped him and his family immigrate and that he's teaching his grand kids egyptian. It's also a nice way to still have davies play the roll.. but have him get a bit more depth and make up for a white guy playing the roll.

And last but not least.. Marion returns, and the two reconcile. I thought it was a bit easy when I frist saw it.. but I see now i'ts more the idea they have a long road ahead.. but both are willing to see it together.. Indy admits he was wrong and Marion is willing to give him another shot. For the third time but at least this time it's likely she just needed some psace to realize he wasn't being callous he just wasn't processing his grief.. and now he's ready to.. maybe they have a shot. It's a nice way to close out the films: Indy's life isn't over, he's got friends, he's got his wife.. and there's always another rainbow.

Assorted Other Stuff: The action set pieces as usual are fucking great, my faviorites easily being the climax and the diving adventure. The latter reminded me a lot of Tin Tin, Red Rackam's Treasure. Antonio Banderas is great as Reynaldo and I only wihs he had a bigger part.. and survived. It's not a huge suprise, saying Antonio Banderas is great. While I LIKED the finale with Marion, I'm with Karen Allen. They could've used her more. She deserves better dammit. WHy is it with the sequels they just can NEVER get bringing her back right?

Last but not least.. ther'es this weird subplot only brought up in the first two acts where the government frames indy for Murder that just.. never gets resolved? Like they never adressed it and as far as I can tell there's no resolution. Now granted I still think Indy isn't going to be arrested: He's clearly been unconcious for a week and Helena did have to get him back into the US, so it's likely the goverment found out about voller, got a debrief from helena.. and agreed to clear her and indy's record and absolve him of murder in exchange for never talking about this to anyone, as a Nazi escaping and killing one of their agents , after they pardoned the guy wouldn't look good. But we needed a line. It's easily the most baffling decision in otherwise a really godo film.

So finally we're , like indy back where we started.. was the film that bad?

When writing the reviews for Crystal Skull and Temple, I honestly hated the films MORE the more I thought abotu them, the more I found wrong, the more I realized how little they did. With this film. it's the opposite. The more I examine dial, the more I find to like. The character arcs, the action, the payoff. It's not perfect, again Indy is still kinda wanted for murder among other little plot gaffes, but I do think Dial is a solid entry in the series and better than both temple and skull at capturing what made the series graet. It dosen't nail it perfectly.. but it's still a fun ride with some really good character work and phenominal performances. Really indy failed.. because no one cares outside of fans of the franchise. As my brother put it when talking about this very film recently, kids don't know indy. It's not the big hit with kids star wars was and is. Star Wars will likekly rebound someday because Kids still dig it and kids will grow up with the sequels the way I grew up with the prequels, warts and all. Disney just assumed Indy was enough to carry it and he wasn't. I'm sad at it because not only is this a good film, but I was hoping for more pulp adventure films. But i'm also happy at what we got and to have done this journey. I saw the good, and the bad. And I saw a franchise I ended up really loving. In the end I got what I needed out of this franchise

#Indiana jones and the dial of destiny #dial of destiny #phoebe waller bridge #harrison ford #indiana jones #helena shaw #marion ravenwood #jurgen voller #disney

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infantisimo · 2 years ago

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In the 1950s and ��60s, women baked cakes in the abandoned ammunition boxes left behind by British troops in the villages of Nagaland, a state in northeast India. The Naga writer Easterine Kire recalls how wives of Christian missionaries taught English and cake-baking to young girls, including her mother. While they didn’t really pick up the language, the tradition of baking cakes was passed down “from mother to daughter and from daughter to granddaughter.” It was the men who thought to repurpose the boxes — they were airtight, preserved heat well and fit perfectly over the wood fire. Since they had no temperature controls, the baker had to sit by the fire, constantly stoking it and eventually reducing it to embers. The timing had to be perfect: A minute too soon or too late could alter the fate of the cake. The boxes eventually ended up becoming part of a family’s heirloom until electric ovens became commonplace.

In the opposite corner of India, in Kerala in the deep south, several bakeries trace their history to the Mambally Royal Biscuit Factory in Thalassery, established in the late 19th century. Its founder, Mambally Bapu, is said to have baked India’s first Christmas cake. Bapu had trained as a baker in Burma (now Myanmar) to make cookies, bread and buns. When he set up shop in 1880, he made 140 varieties of biscuits. Three years later, the Scotsman Murdoch Brown, an East India Company spice planter, shared a sample of an imported Christmas plum pudding. Wanting to re-create this traditional recipe but unable to source French brandy, Bapu improvised with a local brew made from fermented cashew apples and bananas. He added some cocoa and — voila — the Indian Christmas cake was born.

The beauty of the Indian Christmas cake lies in its local variations. The Allahabadi version from north India features petha (candied ash gourd or white pumpkin) and ghee instead of butter, along with a generous helping of orange marmalade. Maharashtrians, in west India, add chironji, also known as cuddapah almonds. The black cake in Goa derives its color from a dark caramel sauce. In the south, in Kerala and Tamil Nadu, cashew nuts are added to the mix. The Indian version is “a close cousin” of British plum pudding, but it has no lard and is not steamed. “Indian Christians add a generous dose of hot spices such as nutmeg, cinnamon, cloves and shahi zeera (royal cumin seeds), roasted dry and then ground and added, also referred to as ‘cake masala,’” writes Jaya Bhattacharji Rose, an Indian publishing consultant, in “Indian Christmas,” an anthology of personal essays, poems, hymns and recipes.

“Our Christmas cakes reflect how India celebrates Christmas: with its own regional flair, its own flavor. Some elements are the same almost everywhere; others differ widely. What binds them together is that they are all, in their way, a celebration of the most exuberant festival in the Christian calendar,” writes Madhulika Liddle, co-editor of the anthology. Reading the book feels like a celebration in itself and makes one realize that Christians in India are as diverse as India, with Syrian Christians, Catholics, Baptists, Anglicans, Methodists, Lutherans and others. Though Christians make up just 2% of India’s population, this equates to some 28 million people.

Christianity came to India in waves. It is believed that Thomas the Apostle arrived in present-day Kerala in 52 BCE and built the first church. Syrian Christians believe he died in what is now Chennai in Tamil Nadu. San Thome Basilica stands where some of his remains were buried. Toward the end of the 15th century, the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama landed on Indian shores, followed by others, paving the way for Portuguese colonies in the region. Christian missionaries, who set up Western educational institutes, spread the religion further. The trend continued under the British Empire.

What is unique about India is the “indigenization of Christmas,” notes Liddle. It can be seen in the regional dishes prepared for Christmas feasts and celebrations. Duck curry with appams (rice pancakes) is popular in Kerala, while Nagaland prefers pork curries, rich with chilies and bamboo shoots. In Goa, dishes with Portuguese origins, such as sausage pulao, sorpotel and xacuti, adorn the tables. Biryanis, curries and shami kababs are devoured across north India.

The same regional diversity can be seen in Christmas snacks. “East Indians,” a Christian community in Mumbai described as such for their close ties to the East India Company, fill their plates with milk creams, mawa-filled karanjis (pastry puffs filled with dried whole milk), walnut fudge, guava cheese and kulkuls (sweet fried dough curls). In Goa, a platter of confectioneries called kuswar is served, including kormolas, gons, doce and bolinhas, made with ingredients ranging from coconut to Bengal gram, a yellow lentil. In Kerala, rose cookies are popular. Common across north Indian Christian households are shakkarpara, a sweet fried dough, covered in syrup; namakpara, a savory fried dough studded with cumin seeds; gujiyas, crisp pastries with a sweetened mix of semolina, raisins and nuts; and baajre ki tikiyas, thin patties made from pearl millet flour sweetened with jaggery, an unrefined sugar.

Liddle, who used to spend the festival at her ancestral home in the north Indian town of Saharanpur, also tells us about a lesser-known variation of the Christmas cake: cake ki roti. (In Hindi, “roti” means “flatbread.”) Like most communities in India, many Christian families in north India buy the ingredients for the Christmas cake themselves and take them to a baker who will prepare it. Bakers used to make the Christmas cake by the quintal (220 pounds) or more, and cake ki roti was a byproduct of that large-scale baking. The leftover Christmas cake batter was “not enough for an entire tin, not so little that it can be thrown away,” Liddle explained. So the baker would add flour and make a dough out of it. “It would be shaped into a large, flat disc and baked till it was golden and biscuity,” she said. The resulting cake ki roti may have “stray bits of orange peel or candied fruit, a tiny piece of nut here or there, a faint whiff of the spices … It was not even the ghost of the cake. A mere memory, a hint of Christmas cake.” Since cake ki roti was considered “too pedestrian,” it wasn’t served to the guests. Instead, it would be reserved until the New Year and eaten only after all the other snacks were gone.

Jerry Pinto, co-editor and contributor to “Indian Christmas,” recalled his childhood Christmases in Mumbai. There may not have been much snow in this tropical city, but wintry scenes of London and New York adorned festive cards and storybooks, and children would decorate the casuarina tree with cotton balls, assuming it to be pine. The mood would be set with an old Jim Reeves album featuring “White Christmas.” “Where do old songs from the U.S. go to die? They go to Goan Roman Catholic homes and parties,” quipped Pinto. Raisins would be soaked in rum in October, and cakes baked at an Iranian bakery. Every year, there was a debate about whether marzipan should be made with or without almond skins. The “good stuff” meant milk creams and cake slices with luscious raisins, while rose cookies and the neoris (sweet dumplings made of maida or flour and stuffed with coconut, sugar, poppy seeds, cardamom and almonds) were just plate-fillers.

The feasting is accompanied by midnight mass, communal decorations and choral music, with carols sung in Punjabi, Tamil, Hindi, Munda, Khariya, Mizo tawng, as well as English. “One of our favorite carols was a Punjabi one, which we always sang with great gusto: ‘Ajj apna roop vataake / Aaya Eesa yaar saade paas’ [‘Today, having changed His form / Jesus comes to us, friend’],” Liddle remembered.

Starting as early as October, it would not be unusual to hear Christmas classics by Boney M., ABBA and Reeves in Nagaland’s Khyoubu village. “The post-harvest life of the villagers is usually a restful period, mostly spent in a recreational mood until the next cycle of agricultural activities begins in the new year,” wrote Veio Pou, who grew up in Nagaland.

“Christmas is a time when invitations are not needed. Friends can land … at each other’s homes any time on Christmas Eve to celebrate. … The nightly silence is broken, and the air rings with Christmas carols and soul, jazz and rock music. Nearly every fourth person in Shillong plays the guitar, so there’s always music, and since nearly everyone sings, it’s also a time to sing along, laugh and be merry,” wrote Patricia Mukhim, editor of Shillong Times, a local newspaper in the northeastern state of Meghalaya.

Neighborhoods in areas with Christian populations, like Goa and Kerala, are lit up weeks in advance with fairy lights, paper lanterns and Christmas stars. In Mizoram’s capital of Aizawl, local authorities hold a competition every Christmas for the best-decorated neighborhood, with a generous prize of 500,000 rupees ($6,000) awarded to the winner. This event is gradually becoming a tourist attraction.

Rural India has its own norms and traditions. In the villages of the Chhota Nagpur region, mango leaves, marigolds and paper streamers decorate homes, and locally available sal or mango trees are decorated instead of the traditional evergreen conifer. The editor Elizabeth Kuruvilla recalled that her mother had stars made of bamboo at her childhood home in Edathua, a village in Kerala’s Alappuzha district. The renowned Goan writer Damodar Mauzo, who grew up in a Hindu household, said his family participates in many aspects of the Christmas celebrations in the village, including hanging a star in the “balcao” (“balcony”), making a crib and attending midnight mass.

In the Anglo-Indian enclave of Bow Barracks in Kolkata, Santa Claus comes to the Christmas street party in a rickshaw — the common form of public transport in South Asia. “Kolkata’s Bengali and non-Bengali revelers now throng the street, lined by two rows of red-brick terrace apartment buildings, to witness the music and dance and to buy the home-brewed sweet wine and Christmas cake that some of the Anglo-Indian families residing there make,” wrote the journalist Nazes Afroz. Bow Barracks was built to house the Allied forces stationed in Kolkata during World War I, after which they were rented out to the city’s Christian families.

Kolkata also is home to a tiny community of about 100 Armenian Christians, who celebrate Christmas on Jan. 6, in line with the Armenian Apostolic Church. Many break their weeklong fast at the Christmas Eve dinner, known as “Khetum.” The celebration begins with an afternoon mass on Christmas Eve followed by a home blessing ceremony to protect people from misfortune, held at the Armenian College and Philanthropic Society, an important institution for the community. The Khetum arranged for the staff members and students includes a customary pilaf with raisins and fish and anoush abour, an Armenian Christmas pudding made with wheat, berries and dried apricots, among other dishes. The Christmas lunch also includes traditional Armenian dishes such as dolma (ground meat and spices stuffed into grape leaves) and harissa, a porridge-like stew made with chicken, served with a garnish of butter and sprinkled ground cumin.

“Missionaries to Indian shores, whether St. Thomas or later evangelists from Portugal, France, Britain or wherever, brought us the religion; we adopted the faith but reserved for ourselves the right to decide how we’d celebrate its festivals,” Liddle wrote. “We translated the Bible into our languages. We translated their hymns and composed many of our own. We built churches which we at times decorated in our own much-loved ways.”

#christmas

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gothicprep · 1 year ago

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one thing that happens when you get a little more literacy in a topic, is that when you see a monocausal explanation for a phenomenon, you realize that it's almost certainly wrong. in the case of disney studios, for example, one phrase that's often invoked to explain everything that's going on with the company right now is "go woke, go broke". people aren't showing up to the movies because they went woke. the streaming service is losing subscribers because they went woke. traffic to disney parks is down because they went woke, etc etc. the problem with doing everything either through the lens of disney's fight with ron desantis or their diverse cinematic releases is that it obscures all the market forces at play.

so, when bob iger cancelled a planned development plan in FL, that cost thousands of jobs and billions in planned spending, iger was pretty happy to let the press spin it one way or the other. truth is, iger hated the development and wanted to cut that out of the bottom line. or if you look at disney plus subscribers, they lost low revenue accounts in india because they didn't want to drop billions on cricket rights. and people love to point to the box office sales, but that's they're fault for poisoning the well and promoting disney plus so heavily and pivoting a lot to streaming over the pandemic and its aftermath. why would you spend $100 to take you and your family to a theater when it will be on disney plus, which you already pay for anyway, in a month and a half?

it just drives me nuts when all these facts are on the ground and yet still think their personal political preferences influence every business decision made in hollywood.

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fastenerworldindia · 5 months ago

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High Quality Hex Nut Manufacturers in India

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shivshaktimachtech · 7 months ago

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Mustard Oil / Edible Oil Bottle Filling Line

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kokomae · 2 years ago

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Order Best Chocolate hampers for birthday Online in India

You can pick from a variety of chocolate choices at Kokomae, including chocolate bars, packs, and gift boxes, as well as flavoured and chocolate-covered nuts. Simply stated, it tastes so amazing that even a small piece of it takes you to another world. Similar to Kokomae's chocolates, which have an amazing and distinctive assortment and can instantly lift your spirits.

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mightyflamethrower · 10 months ago

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“Net Zero” is the hot thing among Climate Change zealots and has been for quite a while.

The idea is simple: if excessive emissions of CO2 are changing the atmosphere sufficiently to cause undesirable changes in the climate, then we have to quit emitting excessive levels of CO2. The “net” part of Net Zero is finding a way to remove CO2 from the atmosphere in the same quantity with which we increase it through the use of machines.

Simple enough. It’s a bad policy, but the reasoning is simple enough to understand.

More than 140 countries, including the biggest polluters – China, the United States, India and the European Union – have set a net-zero target, covering about 88% of global emissions. More than 9,000 companies, over 1000 cities, more than 1000 educational institutions, and over 600 financial institutions have joined the Race to Zero, pledging to take rigorous, immediate action to halve global emissions by 2030.

This policy goal is truly insane, and everybody promoting it is as well. And, as the Telegraph reports, they are incredibly careless as well, playing with human lives and prosperity without thinking anything they do through to their logical conclusions. Their obsession with Net Zero overrides the most basic level of prudence one would expect from world leaders.

Two of the primary strategies for achieving Net Zero are, as you know, electrifying everything while simultaneously abandoning the use of fossil fuels to produce electricity. And, since nuclear power is controversial, time-consuming to construct, and requires a substantial up-front investment, countries are placing almost all their eggs in the “renewable” generation basket.

If renewables were reliable and affordable, it would be a great idea. Who wouldn’t prefer a cheap method for reliably generating a lot of electricity without depleting resources we could use for other things, or stretch out for a longer period? If it is all upside and no downside, why not?

Yeah, well, but…None of that is true, so the advocates get sloppy, deceptive, and push ridiculous propaganda out to obscure the basic facts.

Britain’s climate watchdog has privately admitted that a number of its key net zero recommendations may have relied on insufficient data, it has been claimed. Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith, who led a recent Royal Society study on future energy supply, said that the Climate Change Committee only “looked at a single year” of data showing the number of windy days in a year when it made pronouncements on the extent to which the UK could rely on wind and solar farms to meet net zero. “They have conceded privately that that was a mistake,” Sir Chris said in a presentation seen by this newspaper. In contrast, the Royal Society review examined 37 years worth of weather data. Last week Sir Chris, an emeritus professor and former director of energy research at Oxford University, said that the remarks to which he was referring were made by Chris Stark, the Climate Change Committee’s chief executive. He said: “Might be best to say that Chris Stark conceded that my comment that the CCC relied on modelling that only uses a single year of weather data … is ‘an entirely valid criticism’.” The CCC said that Sir Chris’s comments, in a presentation given in a personal capacity in October, following the publication of his review, related solely to a particular report it published last year on how to deliver “a reliable decarbonised power system”.

Here’s a simple question for you: would you completely upend a system that was working and that undergirded your civilization based on such a limited amount of data?

If the answer is “Yes,” step aside and let the adults make policy because you are a buffoon. Unsurprisingly reality has not matched the fantasy of the Nut Zeros.

But, in response to further questions from this newspaper, the body admitted that its original recommendations in 2019 about the feasibility of meeting the 2050 net zero target, were also based on just one year’s worth of weather data. The recommendations were heavily relied on by ministers when Theresa May enshrined the 2050 target into law. A CCC spokesman said: “We stand by the analysis.” In October 2021 The Sunday Telegraph revealed that assumptions underpinning the committee’s 2019 advice to ministers included a projection that in 2050 there would be just seven days on which wind turbines would produce less than 10 per cent of their potential electricity output. That compared to 30 such days in 2020, 33 in 2019 and 56 in 2018, according to analysis by Net Zero Watch, a campaign group.

It is not accidental or, bad enough, negligence that led to this rather error-prone way of estimating energy needs. Instead this is the sort of strategy used all the time in getting government to do remarkably stupid things: mislead about what the actual costs and benefits of achieving a goal would be.

In my earlier life as an activist, I saw this strategy used all the time: project an unrealistically low cost, claim unreasonably high benefits, and use the sunk cost fallacy to keep the money flowing. Projects in government can escalate in cost by as much as a factor of 20 or more and produce few actual benefits, but once the first dollars flow in the project has a life of its own.

Think high-speed rail in California. Costs have escalated out of control; hardly anything has been built; and a project that was supposed to be already running will likely never get finished. But the gravy train for the people getting the money continues for years or decades. The project got off the ground in…1996 and has consumed untold billions of dollars without much of anything having been built. The project got the green light in 2008, and costs have ballooned with little progress having been made.

The costs for the California high-speed rail project, which voters approved $10 billion in 2008, have risen sharply and the authority has not identified key funding needed for the project that has faced numerous delays. The full San Francisco to Los Angeles project was initially estimated to cost around $40 billion but has now jumped to between $88 billion and $128 billion. The rail authority estimated costs for an initial 171-mile segment connecting Merced to Bakersfield rose from $25.7 billion to at least $32 billion and is hoping initial service will begin in 2030.

Just to let you know, the Merced to Bakersfield portion is all in central California, where few people actually live. In other words, there will be a segment of high speed rail from nowhere to nowhere. Not to offend the good folks of Merced and Bakersfield, but nobody would have approved a $32 billion train from one to the other. It would have been the subject of very unkind jokes.

Now, it is reality, or rather, it might be late in this decade. That is how government scams work.

Nut Zero is using that model. Overpromise, underdeliver, skim a ton of money off the taxpayers and create a disaster.

Nobody involved with Net Zero has your interests in mind, and only the childish believe it is possible or desirable in the foreseeable future. Trillions will be made by scammers, bureaucrats and the transnational elite will gain more control over you, and the average person will be immiserated.

That is the reality of Nut Zero. It is a scam and a power grab. Nothing more. Trust nothing its advocates say.

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