As an aside Vidhi censured me last night for my “polemical” post since it seemed as though she was condoning my views on Arjun Rampal.
I explained to her my perspective that rich and powerful men must always be held to account as they are the movers and shakers of all societies. That includes Mr. Rampal, Mr. Akhtar and Mr. Ali Khan.
It is interesting that Farhan and Saif are the “spoiled” scions of an Indian elite whereas the much more humbler Shah Rukh Khan has kept his marriage and family together (whatever the rumours may be about them).
Farhan Akhtar is simply replicating the pattern of his philandering father and is now infecting his close friend Arjun. What irks me about these boys is that they all have daughters (5 daughters between them and only Saif has a son from his first marriage) and essentially the message they are transmitting to their daughters is that they can be replaced for a younger model when the time comes.
It’s interesting that Zoya Akhtar has never gotten married; the sins of the father visiting upon the innocent daughter. I also think that Alia Bhatt’s older half sister (Pooja Bhatt) never had children either, so it really is the daughters who get the pain of their selfish fathers.
I do not condone selfish behaviour by fathers. I’m not a father and I’m very happily child-free because neither Vidhi or I are at the stage of our life where we want to be parents. As an old school libertarian I don’t believe in laws necessarily regulating human behaviour but custom and culture.
Having children is a long and painful process since they are meant to be the culmination of any relationship. While I believe government has no role in marriage I simply cannot understand how a couple, who cannot bother to have a wedding, can go on to have a child.
I’ve noticed that the most successful children are those that have received intelligent and formidable parenting. Just because a man can happen to have children does not mean he should have them.
While I don’t think abortion should be the answer, it would be incumbent on all to realise that having a child should be a very hard-thought process. A sign of an affluent society is the shift from the quantitative to the qualitative and to my mind the collapsing birth rates are usually a sign of civilisation. Of course the line between self-actualisation and self-indulgence is a sober one so collapsing birthrates in Russia and Eastern Europe is a very different phenomenon to that in Western Europe or the US.
I am simply taking exceptions to the neo-Mughals of Bollywood who strut about thinking they are demi-gods. A good example is when I heard Nasserudin Shah state that he had taught his children (with Ratna Pathak) the Quran to improve their “Tahafuz.”
I’m taking that to mean that their fluency in Urdu but if one wanted to get really good in Urdu it would be better to learn Hindustani and Dari since Urdu is not simply a creolic language where one can add Perso-Arabic words at whim. Also those words that have been added have in themselves been transformed so reading the Quran to learn Urdu is disingenuous and simplyĀ cloaking the real reasons for teaching it to his children.
Linguistics Podcast
Finally we’re doing a linguistics podcast tomorrow; Razib, Ā . Any questions please pop into the comment.
An admission: I have no idea what half of Zach’s posts are about. More clearly, they’re written in English, but there are so many references to Indian/South Asian pop-culture and drop-ins of Hindi-Urdu words that I have no idea what he’s talking about. It might as well be Greek. Often after 30 minutes of Google, I get it, but it’s pretty funny because technically we’re both English-speaking brown people living in Anglo countries.
