Lady V & I just managed to catch Haider and I have to say it was a great adaptation of Hamlet in Kashmir. In Kampala I see Shakespearean adaptation but they aren’t even localised instead it’s copied over word for painful word (especially when done in a different accent so it’s a double adaptation).
Other than that Haider demonstrates the maturity and emerging role Bollywood is weighing on the national conscience. It demonstrates the open-air prison that Kashmir was as well as the huge more ambiguity amongst all protagonists.
Furthermore while staying true to Hamlet and Shakespeare it also managed to infuse a unique desi element that makes the adaptation so compelling. Haider at times was edge of the seat but also weighed on the individual conscience with searing glimpses of the different types of love (& hate) that define the human experience.
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Brown Pundits Archive
Razib Khan is a Bangladeshi-American geneticist and writer. He is co-founder of Brown Pundits and runs Unsupervised Learning, a Substack on population genetics, evolution, history, and politics with more than 55,000 subscribers, alongside the accompanying podcast. He has blogged at Gene Expression since the early 2000s.
His writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, National Review, Slate, India Today, Quillette, and UnHerd. He is Director of Operations at FUTO in Austin, Texas, and co-founder of GenRAIT, a life-sciences platform company. Earlier in his career he developed ancestry algorithms for Gene by Gene, the Genographic Project, and Insitome, and was among the first employees at Embark Veterinary.
Born in Dhaka and raised in upstate New York and eastern Oregon, he holds degrees in biochemistry (2000) and biology (2006) from the University of Oregon, and undertook doctoral work in genomics and genetics at UC Davis. He lives in Austin.
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