With the BBC adaptation of A Suitable Boy garnering rave reviews, its time to revisit the best box office hits set in India:

Danny Boyles Bollywood experiment paid off in 2008 when Slumdog Millionaire was an international smash hit, garnering no fewer than eight Academy Awards. Loosely based on the novel Q & A by Indian author Vikas Swarup, the film wasnt universally adored by critics despite winning big at the Oscars. Still, audiences loved the way it applied the Dickensian drama of a rags to riches story with a vivid depiction of street life in Mumbai. It made stars out of its leads Dev Patel and Freida Pinto and deservedly so.

As the title suggests, this well-known 2001 film plays out over the course of a Punjabi wedding in New Delhi. It has a beautifully understated screenplay and is visually gorgeous, surprising everyone when it grossed over $30 million at the box office a highly unusual feat for a foreign language film at the time. The plot centres on a family gathering from all four corners of the globe for a sumptuous wedding, during which dark secrets from the past threaten to rear their heads again in the present. The titular monsoon occurs at the end of the film and is cathartic in more ways than one.

This endearing film about a culinary friendship that is struck up when a spurned wifes lunchboxes are delivered to the wrong man, won plaudits at The Sundance Film festival. Its a gentle but engrossing plot whose disarmingly vulnerable characters draw you in right from the beginning. The film started its life as a documentary about the famous Mumbai lunchbox system but soon developed into a romantic epistolary tale once the writer realised its potential. A must-watch and my favourite on the list.

Wes Andersons films are always a sensory feast and, in many ways, Indias visually claustrophobic aesthetic is the ideal match for his directorial style. This 2007 tragicomic film about three brothers coming to terms with the death of their father takes place on an Indian train. Most of the film was shot inJodhpur, Rajasthan. As the three brothers attempt to cart around their fathers signature possessions on the cramped train, their search for spiritual enlightenment is at once farcical and deeply relatable. A pitch-perfect reflection on the absurdity and profundity of grief.

The Duchess of Sussexs old chum Priyanka Chopra takes the leading role in this 2019 Hindi Bollywood flick. Chopra recently married Jonas Brother Nick Jonas in a star-studded Mumbai wedding. Here, she plays the role of a mother whose family is divided between London and New Delhi and whose youngest child is diagnosed with a rare genetic disorder. Its as melodramatic and full of song as youd expect from a Bollywood film and, best of all, you can watch it on Netflix.

Much of this Bond classic was shot in Udaipur, India, where Bond infiltrates a floating palace where Bond meets its mysterious owner a wealthy business woman named Octopussy.The Monsoon Palace served as the exterior of Kamal Khans palace, while scenes set at Octopussys palace were filmed at the Lake Palace and Jag Mandir, and Bonds hotel was the Shiv Niwas Palace. The setting makes up for the screenplay which is full of cringe-inducing 007 quips: You have a nasty habit of surviving, says Kamal Khan to Bond. Well, you know what they say about the fittest.

Lion tells the true story of Saroo who gets lost on a visit to the city with his brother and ends up being adopted by an Australian family. The film charts his quest to retrace his past and find his mother and brother again once he grows up. Despite the potential for clich, the plot is utterly engrossing and carefully and thoughtfully navigates the ethical pitfalls that might come with a multi racial adoption story. Author Salman Rushdie was so impressed with the realism of the films Indian segments that he said he wept unstoppably whilst watching it.

This was the crowd-pleasing follow up film from Bend it Like Beckham director Gurinda Chadah. A Bollywood retelling of Jane Austens Pride and Prejudice, its never in danger of taking itself too seriously. Chadah cleverly riffs off the similarities between the social mores of Georgian England and Punjabi marriage traditions to create a film that gave many Western audiences their first taste of Bollywood.

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A Suitable Boy: Seven films to watch that are set in India - Spectator.co.uk

Rewind Time is a tribute to his transitioned homeboys.

Much of the material may sound new to some fans, but Chingy points out that he has studied anatomy, astrology and metaphysics. He considers himself a mystical thinker who looks at how the universe and human beings go together.

Though his music hasnt always reflected it, Chingy (Howard Bailey Jr.) says he has always been this way. Now 40, he says it all intensified when he turned 29 and began doing research.

A lot of people didnt know, throughout my career, I was going to school on the road, he says. Im still going to school online.

Around that time, a bad business situation arose in which a so-called friend in the industry ended up stealing royalties. He says hes still dealing with the situation today and chalks it up to a lack of knowledge back then.

I vowed to never let that happen again, he says. Now I take the initiative to make my own decisions.

Hes more comfortable now than ever with releasing this music; once he hits the studio, its all that comes out.

Thats whats speaking to me, he says. Were in a time where people are going through things and need to hear things that are in a positive space.

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Chingy wants to uplift with self-reflective new album, 'Crown Jewel' - STLtoday.com

An interview with Mike Hastie, a member of Veterans for Peace who federal officers assaulted with pepper spray at close range Saturday night, unprovoked

Michael Hastie was a Vietnam War medic with the U.S. Armyin the early 1970s. Now, at 75, he's on the front lines documenting the Black Lives Matter and now anti-federal troops demonstrations in Portland.

This week hes making national news as the Vietnam veteran in Portland who federal officerssprayed directly in the face at close range with OC chemicals.

Hastie likens himself as a peace photographer, a role he has held for more than 40 years. Hes taken his two Nikon cameras to places such as Palestine, Japan, Nicaragua, Lebanon and Vietnam.

He sees the demonstrations as a flashpoint for revolutionary change in Portland.

Hes also a member of Veterans for Peace. This is an excerpt from an email sent to the groups supporters shortly after the incident, describing the mood Saturday evening about three hours before he was assaulted:

The energy and Justifiable Cause was absolutely electrifying. Once I got into the middle of it, I turned to someone I didn't know and said, God I love this city. The solidarity hairs rose on my back and arms. There were two African-American men leading cheers and chants that hypnotically motivated what would eventually be three thousand Portlanders. At one point, all those people took their cell phones out and turned their flashlights on. What a beautiful scene of togetherness.

He emphasizes that throughout his decades protesting, sometimes change happens one conversation at a time.

When Hastieapproached federal agents just before midnight on Saturdayin front of the federal courthouse in downtown Portland, he was attempting to tell them about his experience as a medic in Vietnam.

I was giving a lecture to the police, he told Street Roots. My job as a Vietnam vet is to tell people why I am protesting to let people know theUnited States government committed atrocities every day inVietnam.

Thats when a militarized federal law enforcement officer wearing a gas mask approaching from his left, abruptly sprayed him with pepper spray the nozzle mere inches from his eyes as the chemicals were sprayed directly onto his face.

Since then, he's been fielding interviews, including with CNN and other national news outlets. The viral video of his assault has been viewed more than 5.6 million times.

The attack came on the heels of another instance of brutality against a veteran in Portland at the hands of federal troops. Navy veteran Christopher David suffered a broken hand after police pepper sprayed him and assaulted him with batons last week.

People are interested in this because they wonder why are two military vets getting pepper sprayed for standing up for our free speech rights what we as former military swore an oath to protect, Hastie said.

Hastie said his eyes recovered around 90% of their normal functioning by Monday afternoon. Hes been contacted by a couple of attorneys to see if I want to pursue suing. He said he is not opposed to litigation.

Neither I or the navy veteran were a threatto anyone. And they just wailed on Christopher David. Two fractures in his hands, he said.

In his childhood, Hasties family moved around a lot, living on both the East and West coasts of the U.S., and in Germany and Japan. His father was a career military man. Hastie enlisted at age 24, and ended up in a medic program at Fitzsimons Army Medical Center in Aurora, Colo.

I spent a year there, undergoing advanced medical training, he told Street Roots.

He turned 25 in Vietnam.

It was toward the end of the war. We got war casualties from time to time. But everything was falling apart, chaos, he said. We saw homicides, suicides, heroin overdoses, addiction.

Hastie may have gone into the Army gung-ho due to the influence from his career military father who had fought in World War Two but he returned to the U.S. a wreck.

I knew I was the enemy, he said. We had no right to bomb Vietnam. It would be as if the U.S. military went into Mississippi and bombed it. Every day we committed atrocities there.

He mentioned, several times, the horror around My Lai, the infamous murder of more than 500 unarmed men, women and children by a group of U.S. Army soldiers in Charlie Company led by Lt. William Calley.

Hastie has sincebeen all over the United States and to numerous foreign countriesto demonstrate against war and U.S. aggression overseas.

He infers a call of duty beyond military allusions: To photograph events and to bear witness and thereby teach people how the U.S. is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world.

In 1967 Martin Luther King gave his Beyond Vietnam oration at New Yorks Riverside Church, and it moved Hastie.

King denounced the U.S. as the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today, and saw the war was a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit. Later that spring, he asserted that the evils of racism, economic exploitation and militarism are all tied together. We could not get rid of one without getting rid of the others (and) the whole structure of American life must be changed.

These words deeply influenced him and the fact that, said Hastie, my own government was spending all this money on war, but not on the poor people, the homeless.

Hastie quoted King again: A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

With protests following the police killing of George Floyd and the wave of social justice demonstrations aligning with Black Lives Matter, Hastie has stationed himself on new front lines.

Hastie was discharged from the military at Fort Hood, and after which he decided to become a nurse. He went to Eugene to go to Lane Community College. Then, he ended up in Portland, finishing his nursing program at Good Samaritan. Hes been in Portland ever since.

For 20 years he worked in emergency rooms as a nurse.

By 1980, Hastie was facing both divorce and the impacts of post traumatic stress disorder.

He was hospitalized for several days with suicidal ideation. That bout was followed by several others once following a visit to Vietnam wherehe spoke withsurvivors of the My Lai massacre.

We were talking to people who had survived it and to family members who did not, right at the very spot at the very ditch where so many murdered Vietnamese were piled up, he said.

He also struggled with alcoholism, but stopped drinking in 1976. A decision that he said saved my life.

He said he realized the myth of American exceptionalism believes the countrys good guy reputation began to tarnish in Vietnam.

The biggest positive thing that came out of the Vietnam War was that I saw myself as a global citizen, Hastie said.

When the blinders come off, he said there can be a disquieting and disorienting reverberation.

Your core belief systems are dismantled. It was like an emotional white out for me, he said. I was a stranger in a strange land when I came home.

Hastie developed a new belief system based on the war experience, his awakening and the Black soldiers in Vietnam who showed him what solidarity means.

He cites Victor Frankl, an Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor, as another influence that helped him frame feelings he had about atrocities hooked to his own memory of the Vietnam War. Much of the trauma comes from enlightenment, Hastie said from knowing about the continuing atrocities this country has perpetrated.

Frankl once said: An abnormal reaction to an abnormal situation is normal behavior. He was referring to the psychological makeup and behavior patterns of prisoners in concentration camps during World War II.

Hastie concluded his email to Veterans for Peace supporters early in morning Sunday, July 26:

Everyone at these demonstrations are committed to standing up for monumental change, at any price. While this government preaches Democracy, that is the very thing the U.S. Government steals from other countries when the U.S. Military invades them. Domestically, the militarized police in America are doing the same thing. Being in Viet Nam woke this white boy up, and so much of that awareness came from Black soldiers who educated me on racism. The Viet Nam War was a racist war, and those who resisted U.S. Power were called, Gooks. Power To The People!

Hastie emphasized that during the Portland protests of late, his role as a freelance photographer is often superseded by his role as sandwich maker.

I show up three times a week to various spots in Portland with my homemade sandwiches, he said.

Too many people know whats going on but dont put their feet on the streets, Hastie said of the ongoing demonstrations in Portland. I dont know if the empire can be stopped with a peace sign, but we are doing what we can. Unfortunately, and Ive said this often, but this country needs to go through more suffering before real change will happen.

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Feds sprayed chemicals into the eyes of a retired ER nurse and veteran - Street Roots News

We have arrived at an ominous moment, when the very legitimacy of the American political order has come under systematic assault. America is on trial in ways that few of us could have imagined even several months ago, when Robert Reillys fine new book saw the light of day.

In his compelling defence of the intellectual and moral foundations of the American regime, Reilly principally takes aim at a group of Catholic scholars and intellectuals, Michael Hanby and Patrick Deneen chief among them, who reject the American proposition in toto, dismissing it as metaphysically corrupt (Hanby) or as a poison pill or ticking time bomb bound to unleash all the corrupting acids of modernity, to recall Walter Lippmans memorable phrase from 1929.

But in our present moment of nihilistic discontent, as statues topple and angry mobs set the tone of public and private life, the assault comes almost exclusively from the Left, now best defined as those who reject every aspect of our civic and civilizational patrimony.

No matter: Reilly has provided a learned, serious, and passionate defence of the tradition bequeathed to us by our Fathers, political, religious, and philosophical. He has provided vital arguments for responding to the assaults on the American proposition from both the secular Left and the traditionalist Right. I welcome and applaud his achievement even if I cannot assent to every step in his argument.

Let us begin closer to home with Reillys account of the moral foundations of the American republic. Reilly is particularly helpful at showing that the most significant and thoughtful among the Founders (an eclectic lot, to be sure) were not partisans of moral relativism, or atomistic individualism, or a reductive and dehumanizing scientific materialism. For the most part, Thomas Hobbes appalled them, for reasons a young Alexander Hamilton eloquently recounted in his essay from 1775 entitled The Farmer Refuted. Hamilton wrote on that occasion:

Moral obligation, according to [Hobbes], is derived from the introduction of civil society; and there is no virtue but what is purely artificial, the mere contrivance of politicians, for the maintenance of social discourse. But the reason he ran into this absurd and impious doctrine was that he disbelieved the existence of an intelligent superintending principle, who is the governor and will be the judge of the universe.

Firmly rejecting political atheism in all its forms, Hamilton goes on to affirm that natural rights must always find their sturdy foundation in the law of nature rooted in the eternal and immutable law of God. Rejecting both despotism and moral antinomianism, the Founders uniformly defended liberty under God and the law.

Even Jefferson, the most modern and Epicurean of the Founders, a deist of a shaky sort, and not a classical theist, was appalled by Hobbes conventionalist view that morality had no grounding in the nature of things, except the minimalist (and amoral) imperative that human beings preserve themselves. There is a thin reed for rights in Hobbes, but no rational foundation for moral and civic obligation.

Reilly is undoubtedly right that the Founders belonged to a different, and infinitely saner and more elevated, spiritual universe than the one inhabited by Thomas Hobbes. Statesmen more than theorists, they still drew on classical wisdom (Aristotle and Cicero) even as they adopted the idiom of modern philosophy and political philosophy. This is a point that needed to be stressed to a greater extent by Reilly as he addresses these matters.

In a founder such as John Adams the Bibles ethical monotheism shines forth, even if Adams ultimately leaned toward Arminianism and even a morally robust deism. Hamilton founded the Society for Christian Constitutionalism in 1796, fearful that Jacobin atheism and proto-totalitarianism was making steady progress on American shores. A deeply thoughtful founder such as James Wilson admired John Locke but feared that his thought could be misconstrued and thus give powerful support to sceptical and morally subversive intellectual and political currents.

All of this is true, and none of it supports Hanbys and Deenens portraits of an American Founding as a vehicle of radical individualism, moral relativism, and a budding philosophy of radical autonomy culminating in the unencumbered self.

Still, the Founders bought into what the great southern Catholic novelist Walker Percy called a mishmash anthropology. No moral relativists, they nonetheless adopted the idiom of the state of nature which was intended by its great proponents to be a substitute account of human origins from the old one, so strikingly provided in the opening chapters of the Book of Genesis. Such an account is remarkably conventionalist, in that it takes its bearings from solitary or semi-solitary individuals in the state of nature who are in no way political animals by nature.

And Locke, a most canny writer, presented arguments in his Second Treatise of Government for human beings being both the product of Divine workmanship and beings who own themselves. Human beings have duties in the state of nature (contra Hobbes) but only when these are not at odds with the overwhelming imperative of self-preservation. For Locke, God and nature are not particularly provident, 9/10, nay 999/1000, Locke says, of what human beings have is the product of human industriousness. In numerous and subtle ways, Locke undermines the multiple reasons why human beings ought to be grateful to a loving and Provident God and a beneficent natural order.

Now, I agree with Bob Reilly that the American Founders were not particularly alert to the subversive or truly radical underpinnings of Lockes thought.

James Wilson, in his famous law lectures at the University of Pennsylvania, saw that Locke had been appropriated by the French encyclopedists and some of the French revolutionaries, too. But he saw this as a wilful and perverse misappropriation of the more traditional affirmations of Locke. But as John Courtney Murray points out in the concluding pages of We Hold These Truths (1960), Locke self-consciously subverts traditional metaphysics, relativizes the moral law, and places self-preservation above moral or civic duty. To be sure, he pays lip service to the judicious Hooker (a great and noble Christian Aristoteliana critic of both Puritan fanaticism and Machiavellian modernity) while not so subtly distancing himself from the premises underlying Hookers (and St. Thomas) thought.

As the example of Father Murray shows, the American proposition is a worthy of defence, even if the Founders were somewhat taken in by Lockes deceptive mlange of practical sobriety and theoretical radicalism. Murray saw that that radicalism came to its fullest fruition in the French Revolution, and not in the Glorious Revolution of 1688, or the American Revolution of a century later.

If we treat the great political men whose courage and determination gave birth to the American republic as statesmen first, and as theorists only intermittently and secondarily, we can begin to judge their achievement on its own terms.

They despised what we have come to call moral relativism even as many of them rooted moral judgment in that psychological faculty that the 18th century called moral sense. The common-sense philosophers Thomas Reid and Francis Hutcheson were their points of reference, more than Thomas Aquinas and Richard Hooker. Most were theists, some deists, but all were opponents of the political atheism that confused human beings with gods.

In honouring the thought that inspired and undergird the Declaration of Independence of 1776, Jefferson and Adams could rightly appeal, and eclectically so, to the Bible, Aristotle, Cicero, Sydney, and Locke, and other great books of public and natural right. That was enough for their statesmanlike purposes. We, on the other hand, are obliged to do more, to think through the presuppositions of a free and virtuous republic in a more intellectually, and philosophically, consistent way.

This is where the first and largest part of Reillys book can make a signal contribution. As philosophically inclined statesman, the founders presupposed much that they did not feel obliged to theorize or articulate in a considered or systematic way. They were profoundly shaped by ethical monotheism, and by a tradition of liberal education that drew freely, and somewhat haphazardly, on biblical and classical wisdom, the Christian marriage of Jerusalem and Athens, and the best and most prudent political wisdom of the enlightenment (especially Montesquieu, to some extent Locke and David Hume).

They also shared their ages confidence in the promise of scientific and (in a qualified way) political progress, while remaining sober about the limits inherent in human nature. They were, in the illuminating words of Martin Diamond, sober revolutionaries who did not commit themselves to impossible dreams that necessarily culminate in totalitarian tyranny.

All of Bob Reillys works remind us (following his informal teacher Father James V. Schall SJ) that reason, not will, guides human beings, and all spiritual beings, in the created order. Islams rejection of that elementary truth has given rise to spiritual and political despotism, and has made it difficult for millions of decent Muslims to oppose the extremists in their midst. Our Creator God is not an oriental potentate in the sky: His reason and goodness take ontological priority over His will.

A few of the American Founders such as the perspicacious James Wilson, arrived at these conclusions, at once theological and political, in his articulation of a jurisprudence fitting a free and decent people. About one vital thing Reilly is right, and crucially so: the American proposition is on the side of liberty under God and the law no matter how inadequately these busy statesmen theorized that foundational truth.

That becomes eminently clear in chapter 10 of his book (The Antipodes: The American Revolution versus the French Revolution) where Reilly established beyond all doubt that American ordered liberty had nothing to do with Jacobin fanaticism, atheism, and tyranny. The American revolutionaries respected limits and constitutional norms: the French revolutionaries monstrously identified republican virtue with revolutionary terror.

They were Bolsheviks avant la lettre. Even Jefferson came to regret his early uncritical support for the French Revolution, as his correspondence with John Adams makes abundantly clear. For Hamilton, Adams, and Washington, America stood for liberty. The French Revolution in contrast stood for a violent rapaciousness rooted in lawlessness and contempt for the rights of God.

Our present-day American Jacobins, who are doing their best to destroy once and for all the rich intellectual, political, spiritual, and cultural patrimony that Bob Reilly so richly displays in this book, are true heirs of the Jacobin terror, and not the gentlemen-revolutionaries of 1776 and 1787. They are moved by a spirit of demonic ingratitude.

One more truth flows abundantly from the pages of America on Trial: there can be no meaningful defence of Western civilization, of order in history, without a thoughtful and manly defence of the great achievement that is the American republic. To attack it in the name of a pure Catholic polity that has never existed, is to leave American Catholics without a country, and without hope for our common life.

Let us rather follow John Courtney Murray and Robert Reilly in clarifying the moral and intellectual presuppositions that our noble Founders could sometimes take for granted. And let us not blame them for the moral rot that owes everything to a transvaluation of values, where a triumphant Will repudiates the Sovereignty of Reason and Goodness with all the deleterious consequences that have come to light in recent years. Bob Reillys excellent book is the work of a scholar and a man of faith who has every reason to love his country despite its present travails. May he be an example to others.

This review has been republished from Catholic World Report with permission.

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The American Founding vindicated against its foes on the Right and Left - MercatorNet